Woody Allen Drops In

Woody Allen came to my office yesterday, but I mistook him for a real estate agent. He was with a group of people peeking in my window when I mumbled hello before rushing around him to jump on a conference call. I later learned that he was checking out my office building as a scene location for his next movie, reportedly starring Larry David (creator of Seinfield) and Evan Rachel Wood. I’ll probably see Mr. Allen again in April when he is actually filming here.

My building is a fantastic treasurer buried in the Chelsea district of New York. It’s one of the few original carriage houses left. When you buzz from the street an old rolling garage door opens and you walk through a narrow alleyway before entering the courtyard. There you face an old three story brick building. On the ground floor - where Woody will actually be filming - an artist has converted the old indoor stable into a studio. It’s beautiful. On the top floor a group of hedge fund guys have launched a business. While my artist neighbor regularly invites me in to chat the money guys simply wave to me while they are smoking cigarettes on the deck. I am in the basement and am the first tenant to restore that floor for commercial purposes. It feels covert, like we are cooking up pr strategies for social justice without constraint.

Not many unannounced visitors show up at my door, which makes it even more surprising that I ignored Woody Allen. I miss the crowded feel of a traditional workspace and I love company, like the afternoons when the building’s owner drops in to install a light switch or pick up the rent check. Yet it is liberating to create a work environment that is catered only to the work.

I built an exercise corner with weights and medicine balls, a lazy living room area with reclining reading chairs and a guitar, and plenty of desk space and computers. I like that I can write on the wall and spill paint on the floor and cram my wall of Ikea bookshelves with both business books and poetry. The idea of the space is to feel creative enough to meet impossible public relations challenges.

A lot of restoration work is left to be completed. My business partner took one look at the bathroom, snapped a photo with her cell phone, and said “we’ll fix this first”.

Despite the restoration work that remains, I think that the purposeful creation of creative workspaces can translate into huge business rewards. A few years ago a study found that British companies rank creating a creative workspace among their lowest priorities, yet studies have shown that this disregard costs British businesses over a billion dollars each year.

Adweek ran an article this month on the new approaches to office space aimed at fostering creativity. Architect Clive Wilkinson said, “The reasons people go to work have changed. They go to work to meet and to collaborate, to brainstorm, to argue, to sometimes do research, to do a whole range of activities they don’t necessarily think about as work in the traditional sense anymore. They’re not going to work to produce something in a predictable, old-fashioned way.”

People can’t produce well over time in an office environment that is out of synch with the work. Public relations will never translate into a math equation that spits out a single right answer. It is complex, ever changing, risky and creative.

Woody Allen is looking to use my building to create the illusion of creativity in his new film; I am in pursuit of an authentic creative space. I probably won’t talk to Woody Allen again and will have to rely on Google to gain any insight about his massive success as a communicator. Woody Allen has said this about his reputation, “The two biggest myths about me are that I’m an intellectual, because I wear these glasses, and that I’m an artist because my films lose money. Those two myths have been prevalent for many years.”