About Cube Rules

The point of view for this blog is that of the 40-million people world wide toiling away for corporations and assigned to one of those ubiquitous office cubes to do the work. This blog is currently read in over 60 countries, showing us that we’re really working for Corporate Earth.

There are hundreds of books and thousands of articles on management, leadership, and how to gain vision for the grand plan. There is little on surviving — or thriving — in a career in a cube.

Career management for people that work in cubes is usually focused on simply finding the next job. But career management is much more than that. It is about being what I call a Cubicle Warrior: networking with your peers, building a personal brand for marketing to managers, building your skills and performance so as to create more opportunities for your work, and the critical skill of being prepared for the inevitable layoff.

How people who work in cubes can interpret what management is really doing, or what employees should be doing to improve their adaptability skills, or how employees can secure their financial future without multi-million dollar restricted stock and dividend pay days are rarely discussed.

They are discussed here.

And a little history, too. The office cube was originally conceived as an improvement over the bullpen environment of most work places. Called the “Action Office,” the original cube wasn’t a cube at all, but a three-sided wall that allowed for bookshelves and places to hang up work like a bulletin board for collaboration sessions.

But companies - aided by tax laws that charged taxes for walled offices and not for partitions like those used in the Action Office - quickly determined that employees could have some walled space, reduce expensive square footage per employee, and tell everyone that it was easier to move the office cubes to adapt to different conditions. But, of course, the partitions don’t move that often because that’s too expensive too.

And the employee maze - Cubical Nation, if you will - was born.

How well you manage your career in the cubicle corporation will determine whether or not you become a Cubicle Warrior.

This blog’s purpose is to help provide that successful navigation.

By the way, the inventor of the office cube - the “Action Office” - came to quickly view his invention as one with dramatic, and unfortunate, unintended consequences. He called it “monolithic insanity.” You can read his story, and the story of the cube, in Fortune’s “The Great Escape.”

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