Quiet (50 page)

  1.
“I am a horse for a single harness”
: Albert Einstein, in “Forum and Century,” vol. 84, pp. 193–94 (the thirteenth in the Forum series
Living Philosophies
, a collection of personal philosophies of famous people, published in 1931).

  2.
“March 5, 1975”
: The story of Stephen Wozniak throughout this chapter is drawn largely from his autobiography,
iWoz
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). The description of Woz as being the “nerd soul” of Apple comes from
http://valleywag.gawker.com/220602/wozniak-jobs-design-role-overstated
.

  3.
a series of studies on the nature of creativity
: Donald W. MacKinnon, “The Nature and Nurture of Creative Talent” (Walter Van Dyke Bingham Lecture given at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, April 11, 1962). See also MacKinnon, “Personality and the Realization of Creative Potential,” Presidential Address presented at Western Psychological Association, Portland, Oregon, April 1964.

  4.
One of the most interesting findings
: See, for example, (1) Gregory J. Feist, “A Meta-Analysis of Personality in Scientific and Artistic Creativity,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
2, no. 4 (1998): 290–309; (2) Feist, “Autonomy and Independence,”
Encyclopedia of Creativity
, vol. 1 (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1999), 157–63; and (3) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 65–68. There
are
some studies showing a correlation between extroversion and creativity, but in contrast to the studies by MacKinnon, Csikszentmihalyi, and Feist, which followed people whose careers had proven them to be exceptionally creative “in real life,” these tend to be studies of college students measuring subjects' creativity in more
casual ways, for example by analyzing their personal hobbies or by asking them to play creativity games like writing a story about a picture. It's likely that extroverts would do better in high-arousal settings like these. It's also possible, as the psychologist Uwe Wolfradt suggests, that the relationship between introversion and creativity is “discernable at a higher level of creativity only.” (Uwe Wolfradt, “Individual Differences in Creativity: Personality, Story Writing, and Hobbies,”
European Journal of Personality
15, no. 4, [July/August 2001]: 297–310.)

  5.
Hans Eysenck
: Hans J. Eysenck,
Genius: The Natural History of Creativity
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  6.
“Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy”
: Malcolm Gladwell, “Why Your Bosses Want to Turn Your New Office into Greenwich Village,”
The New Yorker
, December 11, 2000.

  7.
“None of us is as smart as all of us”
: Warren Bennis,
Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration
(New York: Basic Books, 1997).

  8.
“Michelangelo had assistants”
: Clay Shirky,
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
(New York: Penguin, 2008).

  9.
organize workforces into teams
: Steve Koslowski and Daniel Ilgen, “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams,”
Psychological Science in the Public Interest
7, no. 3 (2006): 77–124.

10.
By 2000 an estimated half
: Dennis J. Devine, “Teams in Organizations: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Effectiveness,”
Small Group Research
20 (1999): 678–711.

11.
today virtually all of them do
: Frederick Morgeson et al., “Leadership in Teams: A Functional Approach to Understanding Leadership Structures and Processes,”
Journal of Management
36, no. 1 (2010): 5–39.

12.
91 percent of high-level managers
: Ibid.

13.
The consultant Stephen Harvill told me
: Author interview, October 26, 2010.

14.
over 70 percent of today's employees
: Davis, “The Physical Environment of the Office.” See also James C. McElroy and Paula C. Morrow, “Employee Reactions to Office Redesign: A Naturally Occurring Quasi-Field Experiment in a Multi-Generational Setting,”
Human Relations
63, no. 5 (2010): 609–36. See also Davis, “The Physical Environment of the Office”: open-plan offices are “the most popular office design” today. See also Joyce Gannon, “Firms Betting Open-Office Design, Amenities Lead to Happier, More Productive Workers,”
Post-Gazette
(Pittsburgh), February 9, 2003. See also Stephen Beacham,
Real Estate Weekly
, July 6, 2005. The first company to use an open plan in a high-rise building was Owens Corning, in 1969. Today, many companies use them, including Proctor & Gamble, Ernst & Young, GlaxoSmithKline, Alcoa, and H. J. Heinz.
http://www.owenscorning.com/acquainted/about/history/1960.asp
.
See also Matthew Davis et al., “The Physical Environment of the Office: Contemporary and Emerging Issues,” in G. P. Hodgkinson and J. K. Ford, eds.,
International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology
, vol. 26 (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2011), 193–235: “… there was a ‘widespread introduction of open-plan and landscaped offices in North America in the 1960s and 1970s.' ” But see Jennifer Ann McCusker, “Individuals and Open Space Office Design: The Relationship Between Personality and Satisfaction in an Open Space Work Environment,” dissertation, Organizational Studies, Alliant International University, April 12, 2002 (“the concept of open space design began in the mid 1960s with a group of German management consultants,” citing Karen A. Edelman, “Take Down the Walls,”
Across the Board
34, no. 3 [1997]: 32–38).

15.
The amount of space per employee shrank
: Roger Vincent, “Office Walls Are Closing in on Corporate Workers,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 15, 2010.

16.
“There has been a shift from ‘I' to ‘we' work”
: Paul B. Brown, “The Case for Design,”
Fast Company
, June 2005.

17.
Rival office manufacturer Herman Miller, Inc.
: “New Executive Office-scapes: Moving from Private Offices to Open Environments,” Herman Miller Inc., 2003.

18.
In 2006, the Ross School of Business
: Dave Gershman, “Building Is ‘Heart and Soul' of the Ross School of Business,”
mlive.com
, January 24, 2009. See also Kyle Swanson, “Business School Offers Preview of New Home, Slated to Open Next Semester,”
Michigan Daily
, September 15, 2008.

19.
According to a 2002 nationwide survey
: Christopher Barnes, “What Do Teachers Teach? A Survey of America's Fourth and Eighth Grade Teachers,” conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis, University of Connecticut, Civic Report no. 28, September 2002. See also Robert E. Slavin, “Research on Cooperative Learning and Achievement: What We Know, What We Need to Know,”
Contemporary Educational Psychology
21, no. 1 (1996): 43–69 (citing 1993 national survey findings that 79 percent of elementary school teachers and 62 percent of middle school teachers made sustained use of cooperative learning). Note that in “real life,” many teachers are simply throwing students into groups but not using “cooperative learning” per se, which involves a highly specific set of procedures, according to an e-mail sent to the author by Roger Johnson of the Cooperative Learning Center at the University of Minnesota.

20.
“Cooperative learning”
: Bruce Williams,
Cooperative Learning: A Standard for High Achievement
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2004), 3–4.

21.
Janet Farrall and Leonie Kronborg
: Janet Farrall and Leonie Kronborg,
“Leadership Development for the Gifted and Talented,” in
Fusing Talent—Giftedness in Australian Schools
, edited by M. McCann and F. Southern (Adelaide: The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, 1996).

22.
“Employees are putting their whole lives up”
: Radio interview with Kai Ryssdal, “Are Cubicles Going Extinct?”,
Marketplace
, from American Public Media, December 15, 2010.

23.
A significant majority of the earliest computer enthusiasts
: Sarah Holmes and Philip L. Kerr, “The IT Crowd: The Type Distribution in a Group of Information Technology Graduates,”
Australian Psychological Type Review
9, no. 1 (2007): 31–38. See also Yair Amichai-Hamburger et al., “ ‘On the Internet No One Knows I'm an Introvert': Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Internet Interaction,”
CyberPsychology and Behavior
5, no. 2 (2002): 125–28.

24.
“It's a truism in tech”
: Dave W. Smith, e-mail to the author, October 20, 2010.

25.
“Why could that boy, whom I had beaten so easily”
: See Daniel Coyle,
The Talent Code
(New York: Bantam Dell, 2009), 48.

26.
three groups of expert violinists
: K. Anders Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,”
Psychological Review
100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406.

27.
“Serious study alone”
: Neil Charness et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
19 (2005): 151–65.

28.
College students who tend to study alone
: David Glenn, “New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges' Doorsteps,”
The Chronicle of Higher Education
, January 18, 2001.

29.
Even elite athletes in team sports
: Starkes and Ericsson, “Expert Performance in Sports: Advances in Research on Sports Expertise,”
Human Kinetics
(2003): 67–71.

30.
In many fields, Ericsson told me
: Interview with the author, April 13, 2010.

31.
ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice
: By the age of eighteen, the best violinists in the Berlin Music Academy study had spent an average of over 7,000 hours practicing alone, about 2,000 hours more than the good violinists, and 4,000 hours more than the music teachers.

32.
“intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers”
: Csikszentmihalyi,
Creativity
, 177.

33.
“because practicing music or studying math”
: Ibid., 65.

34.
Madeleine L'Engle
: Ibid., 253–54.

35.
“My dear Mr. Babbage”
: Charles Darwin,
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin Volume 2: 1837–1843
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 67.

36.
the Coding War Games
: These are described in Tom DeMarco and Timothy
Lister,
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
(New York: Dorset House, 1987).

37.
A mountain of recent data on open-plan offices
: See, for example, the following: (1) Vinesh Oommen et al., “Should Health Service Managers Embrace Open Plan Work Environments? A Review,”
Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management
3, no. 2 (2008). (2) Aoife Brennan et al., “Traditional Versus Open Office Design: A Longitudinal Field Study,”
Environment and Behavior
34 (2002): 279. (3) James C McElroy and Paula Morrow, “Employee Reactions to Office Redesign: A Naturally Occurring Quasi-Field Experiment in a Multi-Generational Setting,”
Human Relations
63 (2010): 609. (4) Einar De Croon et al., “The Effect of Office Concepts on Worker Health and Performance: A Systematic Review of the Literature,”
Ergonomics
, 48, no. 2 (2005): 119–34. (5) J. Pejtersen et al., “Indoor Climate, Psychosocial Work Environment and Symptoms in Open-Plan Offices,”
Indoor Air
16, no. 5 (2006): 392–401. (6) Herman Miller Research Summary, 2007, “It's All About Me: The Benefits of Personal Control at Work.” (7) Paul Bell et al.,
Environmental Psychology
(Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 162. (8) Davis, “The Physical Environment of the Office.”

38.
people learn better after a quiet stroll
: Marc G. Berman et al., “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature,”
Psychological Science
19, no. 12 (2008): 1207–12. See also Stephen Kaplan and Marc Berman, “Directed Attention as a Common Resource for Executive Functioning and Self-Regulation,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
5, no. 1 (2010): 43–57.

39.
Another study, of 38,000 knowledge workers
: Davis et al., “The Physical Environment of the Office.”

40.
Even multitasking … a myth
: John Medina,
Brain Rules
(Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2008), 87.

41.
Backbone Entertainment
: Mike Mika, interview with the author, July 12, 2006.

42.
Reebok International
: Kimberly Blanton, “Design It Yourself: Pleasing Offices Laid Out by the Workers Who Use Them Can Be a Big Advantage When Companies Compete for Talent,”
Boston Globe
, March 1, 2005.

43.
For ten years, beginning in 2000
: TEDx Midwest Talk, October 15, 2010. Also, e-mail to the author, November 5, 2010.

44.
Kafka, for example
: Anthony Storr,
Solitude: A Return to the Self
(New York: Free Press, 2005), 103.