The Hive, Part 3--Crucible
The Crucible was tucked into the third floor of a four-story plot in the Manhattan hinterland between the Village and Tribeca. No buses went there and the closest subways were on 6th and 7th Avenues.
The agency entrance was conceived by an interior designer to evoke money. It was painted a pale blush of green and had black squares and arcs outlined sporadically along its walls. Behind Renee, there was the company logo: an ice blue halo with a stylized "C" and a graceful sans serif font tapping out the seven remaining characters.
Other agencies had monstrous waiting areas for their clients, but the CEO recognized that time was the costliest commodity. Crucible's had just a loveseat, a chair and a coffee table.
This arrangement was meticulously planned. Two men would occupy each the loveseat and chair. Two women would share the loveseat. There was never a situation where three men would be present. If more than three clients arrived, Renee would trot them into the conference room where a morning of fruits, pastries and exotic coffees awaited.
Outside the conference room, in the swell of the office, those nonparticipant employees would tick through the hours of the client meeting until the leftovers were theirs. The designers sat closest the conference room, and met the greatest scavenging success. The production and traffic people saw the least free food.
These small cheats to the system are high capital's saving grace--along with personal use of studio supplies and printers, or purloined pens and pads. The CEO knew this too. In the wobbly days that followed his founding this new agency, he would have an AE send an email announcement that treats were in the conference room. He soon discovered his employees found greater pleasure from "swindling" him than they did in being offered gourmet sandwiches and cans of soda. The emails ceased. Sometimes he conspired in increasing his employees' sense of deception by having an AE spirit the meeting's remains into one of the three refrigerators.
To be a decent leader, to be a greater advertiser, he had to anticipate behavior patterns. If he couldn't successfully do that here, he would have damned trouble doing so on the street, he reasoned.
The rear of the office, its north face, was a dog-legged block of four rooms. Five, if you counted the CEO's intimate meeting space cum antechamber. Each door bore the same blue halo as the logo with the name of the resident printed thereon. These housed the Crucible partners.
Combined they represented 101 years of advertising experience. The CEO was proud of this, but never broadcast it for fear of appearing fossilized. This fear was so ingrained it guided his hiring practices; he encouraged his managers to hire the lean and hungry, graduates and dropouts. He wanted to approve creativity without having to expend the energy to achieve it. And at this point in his career, he was entitled to that.
At present, the Crucible employed 42 professionals. In the agency's three years of existence, they had shrunk to 32 and swelled to 59. Like every office everywhere, half of them were either irrelevant or terminally dull. They slogged along--crunching numbers or nay-saying ideas, quietly correcting other's mistakes and dreaming of a glass of white Zinfandel come 6:30.
Then there were those of charging and recharging genius--prophets, seers, visionaries, artists, masters. They fought tooth and nail with clients. They fought tooth and nail with themselves. They were paid to care about the futures of enterprises they neither used nor particularly cared about. And since the pay bettered their efforts, they were mantled in the illusory comfort of feeling indispensible. This feeling rallied their sense of play, fueled the balloon that ascended the ballast of work. Collegial in the office and spectrums of personal outside, they engaged in an in-jokey patter that was polite and impolitic. On perfunctory study, they were in love with themselves, and transformed this into a like of one another. On another face, they were cohosts of a mutually agreed party. They believed in a philosophical equation: that by happying up their work, they ameliorated their lives, which blew the tiredness off their work. This circular focus was their universe.
But, they and the other they have destinies outside individuality and collection.
The calendar of advertising is feast and famine. And the Crucible had titularly evolved to abide both periods. In the prior, its employees called it The Excrucible or the Crucifix; in the latter, it was simply the Cruiseable. Despite the approaching holidays, the current workload was waxing gibbous.
The agency entrance was conceived by an interior designer to evoke money. It was painted a pale blush of green and had black squares and arcs outlined sporadically along its walls. Behind Renee, there was the company logo: an ice blue halo with a stylized "C" and a graceful sans serif font tapping out the seven remaining characters.
Other agencies had monstrous waiting areas for their clients, but the CEO recognized that time was the costliest commodity. Crucible's had just a loveseat, a chair and a coffee table.
This arrangement was meticulously planned. Two men would occupy each the loveseat and chair. Two women would share the loveseat. There was never a situation where three men would be present. If more than three clients arrived, Renee would trot them into the conference room where a morning of fruits, pastries and exotic coffees awaited.
Outside the conference room, in the swell of the office, those nonparticipant employees would tick through the hours of the client meeting until the leftovers were theirs. The designers sat closest the conference room, and met the greatest scavenging success. The production and traffic people saw the least free food.
These small cheats to the system are high capital's saving grace--along with personal use of studio supplies and printers, or purloined pens and pads. The CEO knew this too. In the wobbly days that followed his founding this new agency, he would have an AE send an email announcement that treats were in the conference room. He soon discovered his employees found greater pleasure from "swindling" him than they did in being offered gourmet sandwiches and cans of soda. The emails ceased. Sometimes he conspired in increasing his employees' sense of deception by having an AE spirit the meeting's remains into one of the three refrigerators.
To be a decent leader, to be a greater advertiser, he had to anticipate behavior patterns. If he couldn't successfully do that here, he would have damned trouble doing so on the street, he reasoned.
The rear of the office, its north face, was a dog-legged block of four rooms. Five, if you counted the CEO's intimate meeting space cum antechamber. Each door bore the same blue halo as the logo with the name of the resident printed thereon. These housed the Crucible partners.
Combined they represented 101 years of advertising experience. The CEO was proud of this, but never broadcast it for fear of appearing fossilized. This fear was so ingrained it guided his hiring practices; he encouraged his managers to hire the lean and hungry, graduates and dropouts. He wanted to approve creativity without having to expend the energy to achieve it. And at this point in his career, he was entitled to that.
At present, the Crucible employed 42 professionals. In the agency's three years of existence, they had shrunk to 32 and swelled to 59. Like every office everywhere, half of them were either irrelevant or terminally dull. They slogged along--crunching numbers or nay-saying ideas, quietly correcting other's mistakes and dreaming of a glass of white Zinfandel come 6:30.
Then there were those of charging and recharging genius--prophets, seers, visionaries, artists, masters. They fought tooth and nail with clients. They fought tooth and nail with themselves. They were paid to care about the futures of enterprises they neither used nor particularly cared about. And since the pay bettered their efforts, they were mantled in the illusory comfort of feeling indispensible. This feeling rallied their sense of play, fueled the balloon that ascended the ballast of work. Collegial in the office and spectrums of personal outside, they engaged in an in-jokey patter that was polite and impolitic. On perfunctory study, they were in love with themselves, and transformed this into a like of one another. On another face, they were cohosts of a mutually agreed party. They believed in a philosophical equation: that by happying up their work, they ameliorated their lives, which blew the tiredness off their work. This circular focus was their universe.
But, they and the other they have destinies outside individuality and collection.
The calendar of advertising is feast and famine. And the Crucible had titularly evolved to abide both periods. In the prior, its employees called it The Excrucible or the Crucifix; in the latter, it was simply the Cruiseable. Despite the approaching holidays, the current workload was waxing gibbous.
posted by J Wilson at Monday, December 12, 2005
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