A View From the Z-suite
All this talk about C-suites!
For whatever reason, a lot of people think that's where I spend my time. They could not be more wrong. I have only seen and been in C-suites a few times in my life, often only to visit someone else who was from there. And of course, I have seen them depicted on TV and in movies. Enormous, impressive offices — usually occupied by somebody yelling at somebody else on the phone and barking orders at the people waiting just outside their door.
Wait a minute! I do that. But just not in a C-suite.
Those Fancy Offices do look pretty cool, but something about them makes me uncomfortable.
Maybe it’s the perception of pretense and certitude emanating from within. Or maybe it’s akin to the feeling I get when I visit a very grand house, a mansion. I am awed by it, sure— but I would never live there. That sort of living is just not for me.
So I’m here to tell you that I am not from that. When you think about someone being a businessman, capitalist, founder, entrepreneur: all of those fancy titles? You should know that many of them — hell, maybe most of them — would not know a C-suite from a hole in the ground. In fact they may know much more about holes in the ground, having dug a few and perhaps crawled into one every once in a while. A decent hole in the ground can be a good place for your head when times get confusing; as long as the hole has a lot of sand around it.
Photo by Despoina Apostolidou
So, where have I done all those good days’ works, if not in a C-suite? Hmm, let me see...how about the basement, the spare bedroom, WeWork, a friend's office, the coffee shop, a bed in a Holiday Inn?
They all worked just fine, if I was fine with my work. And if I was not, no C-suite in the world would compensate. Those places, and many more? Let's just call these Z-suites. Places where the corner office is, literally and figuratively, all in your head. The Z-suite is anywhere you can go to wrangle whatever idea you’ve got stuck in your noggin out into the daylight so that everybody else can see it, and so that you can see it, too.
What kind of person goes to work at the Z-suite? Could be somebody without a lot of money to rent a traditional office. Or maybe this person is just starting out and trying to build the concept and business. Or someone whose work is mobile and evolving — they can work wherever they happen to be. Just like happiness, work can happen any place and everyplace, if you let it. Z-suite-ers are often playing the Come Bet, taking a risk, rolling the dice. Z-suites can be places with little support, where you spend your time trapezing with no net.
Photo by Victor Moragriega
You get used to it, facing that risk — until you slip and fall, and that tends to hurt. But since they don't seem to design or build Z-suites to be too many floors up above it all, the fall is never very far.
The funny thing about Z-suite-ers is that sometimes, even often, they are quite successful.
Successful enough to move to a better suite should they so desire. Many do, and that's great. But some don't, ever. And others just keep recreating their own unique Z-suites long after they could have moved on up to a C-suite.
Take Tito, for instance. The vodka guy.
Along with his hound dog for company and a very beat up pickup truck for transportation, Tito has created his own Z-suite…in the warehouse. His Z-suite walls are adorned with fascinating and colorful examples of the folk art he collects, but no furniture sits on the concrete floor. Except the folding table someone brings in every afternoon to provide a surface upon which to open the mail and pay the bills. After that’s done, I presume someone comes in and removes the table and the space goes back to being a warehouse, folk art museum, or whatever the hell else Tito wants his Z-suite to be.
Years ago, just a few miles down the street from Tito’s East Austin warehouse, Michael Dell created a very different, but functionally similar, Z-suite of his own. It consisted of a cheap, possibly previously-owned metal desk, positioned right out on the office floor along with perhaps 50 other employee desks, all of them exactly the same as Michael's desk. You've seen those metal desks, usually at the Dept. of Motor Vehicles, or even your local police station. The person who sits there is forever perturbed with just about everything in this world, and definitely cannot help you with whatever it is you need help with. Maybe that’s giving the cheap metal desk a bad rap. Michael Dell is a case in point. His Z-suite desk was definitely set up to help you and all of the other 50 employees whose desks were lucky enough to be placed in Dell’s Z-suite. So that they, in turn, could help others. Next time you turn on your Dell laptop and it works just like it's supposed to and you put in a good day’s work with it, give a brief salute back in the direction of Michael Dell’s Z-suite. And perhaps even raise a toast to Tito (with Tito’s vodka of course) for paying his bills on time in that warehouse Z-suite he likes to use.
Why do you suppose these two billionaires, as well as countless others never seem to leave the Z-suite, even after they are able to?
Maybe it’s because at some point you learn that the suite does not make the man. Or in the case of the Z-suite.... maybe it does?