Deep Dive: Making space for work
Can B2B companies reimagine physical spaces with radical ideas that give customers, employees, and the broader community a place to do their work?
Recently, I listened to Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, on the Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel. Decoder’s episodes are about big ideas and problems, and the show interviews top-tier innovators and policymakers. Chesky covered a wide range of topics relevant for all B2B innovators, starting with how Airbnb survived after immediately losing 80% of its business at the very beginning of the pandemic and then went public nine months later. But what interested me most was his mindset and experience leading a virtual company created to market physical spaces in the real world. His comments expand two ideas introduced in earlier editions: Can B2B companies reinvent physical spaces as a place for customers to do their work? And, will distributors reinvent themselves as radical intermediaries to offer integrated products and services and revolutionary customer experiences? Chesky does not address these ideas directly, but by viewing customers, partners, and communities through his lens, B2B innovators may be able to reimagine their established businesses better. I’ve had many conversations about ideas for repurposing physical spaces, but I am still looking for game-changing implementations. If you know of revolutionary or radical uses of physical spaces by B2B companies, please reach out. In the meantime, I continue to develop ideas and offer inspirations in this edition.
Beyond traditional business models
Every quotation below is drawn from the transcript of Chesky and Patel’s podcast conversation. Below Chesky’s insights, I offer context and ideas for B2B innovators. Chesky describes Airbnb as a “three-dimensional” business, meaning a tech company that operates in the real world, facilitating experiences in physical spaces. It seems to me that this term applies to spaces repurposed by B2B companies as well, especially if they are somehow enabled by digital technologies. I found the discussion fascinating. If you are open to thinking about physical spaces and radical business models, you will too.
We’re to have a generation of people who will be less tethered to the office and be more nomadic.
Traditionally, Airbnb serves guests as they travel for vacation, often taking their work with them. But as office workers increasingly work away from their desks, they are booking properties for extended periods, often weeks or months, to do their work away from home. Some live permanently on the road as Airbnb guests—with no home or perhaps a minimal permanent space near family or work. These preferences apply to B2B customers that are office workers, holding positions as owners, leaders, managers, accountants, engineers, and so on.
However, many B2B customers are already “nomadic” in that their primary work is in the field or non-office workspace where they apply skilled labor to make repairs, create meals, install new equipment, style hair, drive trucks, deliver packages, and more. For many, there are already occasions when swinging by a distributor branch is a regular event for picking up a purchase, renting equipment, receiving training, visiting a showroom, or asking for hands-on, face-to-face advice.
The opportunity for expanding customers’ use of physical spaces is about tapping into an evolving zeitgeist and redesigning facilities as gathering spaces for socializing, meeting rooms for work sessions, and tours for strengthening relationships. Work done by customers in a B2B space may include accessing data and applying analytics, directing light manufacturing or assembly of custom solutions, or walking through simulations to improve operations. The key is to enable a customer’s jobs to be done while tapping into their preference for working on the road and away from a desk. But that may not be enough. There are other human needs to be met and opportunities to serve. Chesky digs deeper.
There is a significant risk to the digital revolution: we are living in one of the loneliest periods in human history. When you take physical communities and you atomize them, they’re not always as nourishing as the physical world. No one has ever changed someone else’s mind in a YouTube comment section.
Over and over, my research finds that as we do more of our work and live more of our lives online in the virtual world, we want more from our human interactions in the real world. B2B spaces in the physical world are staffed and visited by people that live in the community, work in the same industry, and compete in the same market. This means that the environment is comfortable, and the people are familiar. B2B spaces are a place for professional relationships, comradery, and intimacy of the kind shared between business partners. B2B spaces are “good for what ails us” in the digital age.
B2B spaces are also a place to get things done. As business people, customers and suppliers value sharing information and working through issues to solve problems. They are open to changing their minds for a compelling argument, growing sales, or improving profits. This means that B2B innovators must design events as well as spaces. Events might include a one-on-one meeting across a counter, a briefing by a subject matter expert on topics of mutual interest, policy discussions with local, state, or national politicians, opportunities to help social organizations, and interactions with business leaders that form the fabric of a community.
Airbnb has established a host portal with guides, tools, and best practices for hosts—and to allow hosts to ask questions and solve problems with other hosts. Every B2B company could do the same, created by corporate operations for store or branch managers—or for individual employees at a store, warehouse, or showroom location. The goal is to build a culture of hosting customers as not just guests, but as collaborators, through well-designed events. That is, working together with customers and others to solve issues, build capabilities, or continue education.
B2B innovators may combine well-designed spaces and events by tapping into new thinking about how we think as humans. In my edition about human cognition and business innovation, I shared insights from Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Since then, Paul has launched her own Substack newsletter. In one edition, she shares how our intelligence as humans results from our vulnerability. For me, this insight goes to transparency. Being transparent means embracing vulnerability. Sharing data creates stress because there is a risk in sharing proprietary information. But properly channeled, that stress pressures leaders, teams, and workers, leading to better thinking within and across organizations. And better thinking leads to better strategies, products and services, customer experiences, and more.
If I could have done Airbnb all over again, I would’ve designed Airbnb with more stakeholders in mind, including communities.
Communities are essential for B2B innovations. By serving communities, B2B companies go beyond targeting prospects and segments to working toward a shared purpose. New product development is enhanced as customers, nurtured as communities, commit their ideas and energy to help identify features and benefits, overcome problems, speed launch, and align with the brand. (For details, see previous newsletters here and here.)
Communities are also essential for innovating physical spaces. Chesky found that as a technology company, Airbnb has positive and negative effects on cities and towns. Initially, he avoided conflict but later found that by building community relationships and working through issues, Airbnb found ways to respond to community needs. Through these efforts, Airbnb overcame barriers and established relationships in “100,000 towns and cities, at every price point from $20, $30 a night to thousands of dollars a night, for any length of time.” These results make a very good argument for working with communities as B2B companies innovate physical spaces.
Airbnb has also created community portals, sharing the company’s impact and contribution in cities and offering tools for enforcing city regulations and direct communications between neighborhoods and Airbnb’s centralized and responsive resources. In a way, community portals are a digital method for reestablishing community relationships. As B2B companies have embraced selling online, they have diminished their cultures built on living in the communities where they work.
B2B companies may go further, offering their facilities to organizations, governments, citizens, and other businesses, adding a new dimension to their relationships, one that goes beyond providing jobs and paying taxes. Community colleges may use B2B facilities for in-the-field classes. Tours for high school students may help promote interest in careers in the skilled trades. Allowing employees to host an after-hours meeting with charities may help build their contribution to those organizations— and at the same time strengthen the company’s culture to include “making a difference” at home and work. More and more, the future of work is not about work/life balance, but instead, integration of work and life through communities, shared purposes, and intrinsically human rewards.
When Airbnb became a functional org [to survive the pandemic and go public], suddenly the entire company was on one roadmap. We all had the same exact priorities. There were fewer meetings. Decision-making was faster. Quality was better. … The primary thing a creative company wants is to run off a calendar. Metrics are secondary. Most companies run off metrics, and the calendar is secondary, but the way you do work is you have deadlines.
Chesky’s insights go hand-in-glove for B2B innovators—especially as they consider redefining their role in the value chain as a radical intermediary. Many B2B businesses, especially smaller and midmarket companies, are organized as functional organizations. The leader of sales, marketing, operations, finance, and more operates as a leadership team, reporting directly to a single leader at the top of the company. The revolutionary aspect of a functional organization is not the structure itself but its ability to continually implement projects at a very high speed. Functional organizations focus everyone—leaders, managers, teams, and workers—on a single purpose embodied by the company itself. There is no dilution or distraction of effort. Chesky goes further by managing against a calendar, not metrics. Managing metrics is about aiming for outcomes. Working against a calendar is about demanding execution without slippage.
What matters is what matters to customers. Just as software companies innovate by launching new code, upgrades, and platforms, so can a B2B company aim to establish a continual stream of customer experience improvements and innovations. Products and services, and all of the internal efforts required to support them, are correctly managed as enablers for achieving customer outcomes in the customer’s business and its communities where its people live and work.
By adding an emphasis on physical spaces as a way to engage and serve customers and communities, B2B innovators pull their companies into the real world, where the work that matters most is done.
Join our innovation community by asking questions
In this edition, the questions I suggest are not about the content offered above but about your process for forming your ideas, insights, and potential innovations:
When is the best time for you to listen to the podcast and read the transcript in an environment that supports human cognition?
Who would you invite to explore Chesky’s insights with you, and how will you explore his ideas independently and together?
Who should you add to your list of fellow explorers by including people from outside your usual comfort zone, perhaps people from customers, partners, or communities?
As you capture implementation ideas, can you go beyond creating new customer value to deepening human bonds and trust?
Are you willing to share your ideas and questions with me? Either in the comment section below or by reaching out at mark.dancer@n4bi.com?
Chesky’s openness is impressive, and Patel’s questions are powerful. If you agree, I hope to hear from you. Feel free to click here to schedule a call or send me a note at mark.dancer@n4bi.com.