A Facility Based on Change

As sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter argues in her 1984 book Change Masters, the period from 1960 to 1980 was one of unprecedented economic, social, and technological change that in turn had significant implications for organizations across every industry.Footnote ¹⁰ By the 1970s, the United States was in an economic recession, facing rising inflation, growing unemployment, a drop in productivity, and an emerging energy crisis.Footnote ¹¹ Meanwhile, new technologies were upending many administrative practices, transforming the organization of work in offices, and creating new organizational challenges. These rapid changes in turn meant that companies too were changing, often on the fly, adopting new management ideas, integrating new technologies, and even reorganizing large segments of the business to reduce costs, improve collaboration, increase productivity, or foster innovation. In this new era of “change management,” organizations were increasingly treating their entire corporate structure as an open system that could be reconfigured at a moment’s notice.Footnote ¹²

These new management theories that were taking hold in the 1960s were also deeply influential to architects and designers who began promoting a new office concept called the open plan. In 1968, Herman Miller introduced Action Office, a novel furniture system composed of modular components that could be assembled in a variety of configurations to serve different workplace needs. Figure 1 shows a marketing image showcasing a dynamic Action Office installation populated with people and work materials to demonstrate the flexibility of the furniture to serve different workplace needs. As part of the release of their new furniture, Herman Miller published a book by designer Robert Propst called The Office: A Facility Based on Change that argued for the importance of responsive offices that could accommodate ongoing change with grace and efficiency.Footnote ¹³ In all of their marketing for Action Office, Herman Miller emphasized the ways in which the new furniture concept was designed expressly to promote and support organizational change as well as to allow workers to adapt and change their own workspaces as needed. These ideas clearly resonated with many organizations, and by the early 1970s, there were dozens of competing open plan furniture systems on the market promising organizations a spatial solution that would allow them to adapt their space instantly to any organizational change, creating and removing divisions, adding and subtracting workers, and integrating new technologies and processes, all with the snap of their fingers.Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 1.

A 1972 Herman Miller marketing photograph of an Action Office installation showing a mixture of modular partitions, work surfaces, storage components, along with freestanding furniture assembled to create a variety of workstations. Image courtesy of Herman Miller Archives.

Figure 1. Long description

In the foreground on the left, a mobile file cart on casters sits near a desk holding a large typewriter. At the center, a woman in a plaid dress sits in a swivel chair at a desk with a built-in privacy screen, writing on a document. To her right, a low white storage cabinet is topped with a small plant.

The midground is defined by modular partitions of varying heights. Behind the seated woman, a tall partition features a large geometric black-and-white graphic pattern. To the left of this graphic, another workstation is visible with shelving units and books.

In the background, the office extends into a large open area under a grid-patterned drop ceiling. A man stands at a chalkboard or dark partition in the distance, appearing to draw or write, while another individual is seated further back. The space is characterized by clean lines, functional furniture, and a mix of open and semi-private work zones.

Yet as the open plan concept became more popular in the United States, many organizations found that the promise of change associated with systems furniture was often at odds with the logistical challenges of its operation and use. Offices that adopted this new office design concept soon found that they needed an entire administrative apparatus to manage the furniture and any proposed changes. In contrast with the traditional building managers of the past, whose job had revolved primarily around building maintenance and operations, these new facility managers were responsible for the interior arrangement and design of the office itself. As part of their job, they were managing the furniture inventory and keeping track of all the parts and pieces of the system in use throughout the office; they were creating space plans to address change requests, and they were handling all of the technical and human logistics of these interior changes.Footnote ¹⁵

By the late 1970s, Herman Miller’s research division had begun to recognize the increasing importance of this new class of worker who played such a pivotal role in the adoption, implementation, and use of the open plan and systems furniture. In 1978, as part of a study on the productivity benefits of Action Office, the Herman Miller Research Corporation (HMRC) conducted a series of interviews with facility managers and other administrators working for some of their top clients, including Hallmark, Kellogg’s, Michigan State University, and Upjohn. Their research found some distinct patterns and challenges that were unique to this emerging class of professionals, particularly as it related to the management of space changes.Footnote ¹⁶ For example, at Hallmark, one administrator reported that space changes were a daily occurrence, much of it driven by growth and expansion. While some changes were quite minor, such as adding or adjusting a single workstation, others might require changes to fifty or more workstations at a time. He even describes creating workstations for short-term projects, where an entire work group might be relocated for a few months or even just a few weeks before being disassembled again.Footnote ¹⁷ This constant demand for space changes had created a rapid expansion of the facilities team itself at Hallmark, growing from just six people in 1969 to a team of seventeen by 1978.Footnote ¹⁸ In this way, the constant shifting of partitions and furniture components demanded parallel growth in the administrative structure to manage space requests and implement change.

On the heels of that project, in November of 1978, HMRC organized a conference focused on the “Facility Influence on Productivity” which brought together a group of thirty-seven executives and facility managers from a variety of different organizations across multiple industries who were interested in the challenges and opportunities of facilities planning, design, and management.Footnote ¹⁹ By many accounts, this particular conference, with its “think tank” environment, was a landmark event, both for the staff at HMRC as well as for many of the participants, who recognized shared challenges in the management of the office.Footnote ²⁰ In the aftermath, two participants actually wrote to Herman Miller asking that they be given a seat on the Board of Directors at Herman Miller to represent intensive users of their products. While CEO of Herman Miller, Max De Pree, declined the suggestion, he thought the letter did point to the need for Herman Miller to conduct more research on the needs of these intensive corporate users.Footnote ²¹

Robert Propst, the head of HMRC, then tasked newly hired David Armstrong, a former Associate Dean at Michigan State University, with conducting more research on the issue and creating a program that would focus on the management of the office facility. By his own account, Armstrong started with several key ideas that he viewed as central to the emergence of this new management need: the growth of white-collar work, the newness of the management position, the lack of colleagues and professional support, the lack of education and training, and the lack of professional literature.Footnote ²² These ideas became the cornerstone of his concept for an academy that would focus on research and training for this new class of managers.

The term “facility management” was originally coined in the 1960s by Ross Perot, former U.S. presidential candidate and founder of tech company Electronic Data Systems, to refer to the organizational responsibility for the installation and management of computers. This origin of the term is significant because it anticipates the future importance of facilities in the management of computer technology, and the role of computers in the management of facilities. However, by the late 1970s, “facility management” was already in common use to refer to commercial space management.Footnote ²³ The term “facility” is significant as it underscores the idea that facility management was never just about office environments. In fact, Herman Miller had begun using the term facilities in the early 1970s. Robert Propst described the “facility thrust” of the era, and recommended that Herman Miller move toward a “multi-purpose philosophy” that would integrate offices, technical spaces and production areas in a “fluent and dynamic manner.”Footnote ²⁴ Building on this concept through the 1970s, Herman Miller expanded the Action Office concept to factories, warehouses, hospitals, and laboratories, thereby recognizing the utility of the systems furniture concept across multiple workplace environments. By 1979, Herman Miller was using the concept of the “integrated facility” to describe the interface of architectural and technical systems that fit the needs of the organization and users.Footnote ²⁵ The “facility” turn thus sought to recognize the need to manage space beyond just offices, and to create systems, structures, and processes that included the multiple kinds of spaces and systems that were in operation across industries. HMRC formally registered “facility management” with the U.S. Library of Congress and adopted the term as the name of their new program: The Facility Management Institute.Footnote ²⁶ In the spring of 1979, Herman Miller’s Executive Group green-lit the program, which was designed to provide support, research, and professionalization for the emerging field of facility management. The new institute would offer educational programs for facility managers, a research division focused on understanding this new field, including its challenges and its needs, and a consulting division that worked directly with companies on their facility management issues.Footnote ²⁷

In their effort to develop and promote facility management as a field, FMI was drawing on a number of management strategies and practices that Nigel Thrift has termed the “cultural circuit” of capitalism in the late twentieth century, including the growth of business schools, management consultants, gurus, and other business-oriented media, that became part of the “feedback loop” of capitalism. As Thrift notes, management theory and seminars of this era often had the fervor of “religious revivalism” combined with the “new age” philosophy of the era that sought to understand and improve the self and create “change agents.”Footnote ²⁸ Building on this common practice of the management seminar, FMI’s programs aimed to cultivate facility management as a field, and they used their own seminars as a means of spreading the gospel about the value of office space as a tool of the organization. A 1981 article in Interiors referred to the “missionary zeal” of FMI’s programs and described how the seminars were designed as “an intensive bombardment of new concepts and strategies, a merciless and, by design, shattering reconstructive experience.”Footnote ²⁹ Such descriptions capture the energy, optimism, and ego of the FMI team, who sought to build both awareness and enthusiasm, and send out newly minted facility management evangelists into the world.

There is no doubt that the FMI was a strategic investment for Herman Miller. In the original proposal for FMI, Armstrong laid out the case for its benefit to the organization, including establishing Herman Miller as a “knowledge leader,” reinforcing the company’s message on the “principles of effective facility management,” serving as a forum for Herman Miller research; advocating for the “integrated facility” concept; and stimulating “purchase contract relationship” with clients. Armstrong’s proposal also assured Herman Miller that FMI had “excellent market potential” and had the “capability to be a profit center” for the company.Footnote ³⁰ Further, there was already significant evidence that the success of systems furniture as an industry and the success of facility management were closely connected. In their 1979 internal report titled “Growing into Facility Systems Management,” Armstrong and Claudia Propst looked at the facility management practices of multiple Herman Miller customers and found a strong correlation between the growth of facility management divisions and the spread of systems furniture through an organization.Footnote ³¹ In other words, the fate of facility management and the fate of the systems furniture industry were tied together, and it was in the interest of Herman Miller to support the growth and expansion of facility management as a field. Some staff members at Herman Miller even joked at the time that the real slogan for FMI should be “from the people who brought you the problem, here’s the solution.”Footnote ³²

Throughout its years of operation, FMI sought to maintain the illusion of autonomy and independence from Herman Miller, but in practice they were closely connected to their parent company. In fact, FMI was sometimes accused by its critics of being little more than a branch of Herman Miller’s marketing division.Footnote ³³ FMI promoted Herman Miller’s research on office design as well as their products, even treating their own offices as a “showroom” for Herman Miller products.Footnote ³⁴ Figure 2 shows a photograph of the FMI offices that was used as part of their media outreach to demonstrate the latest concepts in office planning using Action Office.Footnote ³⁵ Notably, the image bears a striking resemblance to Herman Miller’s own marketing photographs at the time, as seen in Figure 1, with its careful staging of furniture, décor, and people to showcase the flexibility of the furniture within an office environment. In addition to their active promotion of Herman Miller products, the research conducted by FMI was also utilized by Herman Miller in their research, design, and marketing for their furniture, creating a synergistic relationship between the two organizations.Footnote ³⁶ There was also significant overlap of employees between FMI and Herman Miller Research Corporation, both in terms of professional and support staff.Footnote ³⁷ Meanwhile, David Armstrong was such a good spokesperson for the field and for Herman Miller that within just a couple of years of establishing the institute, he would leave it to become the Vice President of Marketing at Herman Miller.Footnote ³⁸ Through the FMI, Herman Miller was actively building relationships with organizations across all sectors that certainly helped with sales of their furniture. FMI was also creating a group of true believers within organizations who embraced the design concepts underpinning the open plan office, understood the value of systems furniture as an office solution, and could advocate for its usage through their roles.

Figure 2.

A promotional photograph of FMI’s office space in Ann Arbor prominently featuring Action Office furniture and Herman Miller seating.

Note: the visual similarity of this image to the marketing photograph shown in Figure 1. Image courtesy of Herman Miller Archives.

Figure 2. Long description

The photograph depicts a large, open-plan office divided by the Action Office modular system.

* In the foreground, a low partition on the right holds a large potted plant and displays geometric art prints under a shelf light. To the left, another low partition serves as a counter with a smaller plant.

* In the center, a man and a woman sit at a round wooden table for a meeting. They are seated in white molded shell chairs with swivel bases. The man wears a vest and white shirt, while the woman wears a short-sleeved knit shirt.

* Behind them, a tall partition features a decorative fabric panel with a repeating circular geometric pattern.

* In the mid-ground to the left, a cubicle contains a desk with a telephone and various papers. A nameplate on the partition reads Paul Pope.

* In the background, another employee sits at a desk within a glass-walled partition labeled Jim Andrews.

* The ceiling is a grid of acoustic tiles with recessed fluorescent lighting. The floor is covered in a dark, uniform carpeting. The overall layout emphasizes semi-private workspaces created by varying heights of interlocking panels.

People, Process, Place

FMI’s slogan was “people, process, place,” often written alongside a trio of intersecting circles. In a recent essay, David Armstrong described the origins of this graphic and slogan, which was so core to the philosophy and image of FMI. In the late 1970s, as Armstrong and his team began conducting research on facility management, they found that most organizations had a well-developed Human Resources division that addressed the needs of its people, and a clear operational division that handled work processes, but very few had a division focused specifically on space. As he and his new team began to document this gap, they used a diagram that they called “people, place and process” in which each area was represented by a circle. According to Armstrong, the size of the circle represented its effectiveness, and the closeness of the circles to each other reflected integration. In most organizations they studied, the people circle was always the largest and closely connected to process, but place was often very small and removed from the other two areas. As he described, “in an ideal world, optimum efficiency and productivity would occur when the three circles would intersect.” So was born the graphic and the mantra, “the 3 P’s” that would become not only a defining concept for FMI, but also for the field itself.Footnote ³⁹

By starting with people (rather than place or process), FMI also signaled their emphasis on supporting and prioritizing the human aspects of the workplace. FMI’s effort to prioritize people above all else echoed Herman Miller’s own design and marketing of Action Office, which had been designed first and foremost to support the physical, social, and material needs of workers. This focus also reflected the social turn of architecture and design in the 1960s and 1970s, which increasingly integrated new research in ergonomics, human factors, environmental psychology, and proxemics.Footnote ⁴⁰ Translating some of these ideas, philosophies, and methods to facility management, FMI often emphasized the importance of centering the needs of workers. In fact, one of their early studies focused on the influence of personality types as defined by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test (MBTI) on the design needs of the office to show how design choices in the workplace needed to map quite explicitly and directly to each worker’s individual needs and their personal preferences. As David Armstrong summarized in a presentation in 1983: “personality variables, work process, and the physical workplace are more likely to be mismatch than matched. Such a finding implies that when most work environments are constructed, little attention is paid to the actual details of the work to be accomplished in those spaces, and even less is given to the diverse characteristics of people performing that work.”Footnote ⁴¹

Across all of their materials and activities, FMI often emphasized not only the interplay of people, process, and place, but also their tensions, particularly the ways in which the priorities, needs, or restrictions of each could conflict. For example, in their 1985 publication, The Negotiable Environment, authors Cecil Williams, David Armstrong, and Clark Malcolm describe the dynamic quality of this relationship between people, process, and place. As they write, “because the ecology formed by an organization, its members, its work, and its environment is so volatile and resistant to permanence, the relationship among the members should be characterized as a negotiation—constant negotiation.”Footnote ⁴² In their words, “by recognizing that people need vastly different environments at different times—and occasionally need an environment that can react to several contradictory need simultaneously—facility management in particular and organizations in general can manage human nature (with all its diversity and contradictions) through the environment.”Footnote ⁴³ The facility manager was the linchpin of the negotiable environment, assessing the priorities of the organization, the constraints of the environment, and the diverse needs of workers to create a workable solution that served everyone’s needs.

These ideas were central to FMI’s consulting work with clients including companies like American Express, Honeywell, Johnson Wax, Philips, and Northrop. For example, in a proposal looking at Herman Miller’s own facility management program, they emphasized that they would utilize three of FMI’s key concepts in their study, including “integrated management” of facilities, which emphasized the need for all facilities decisions to be managed by one operational unit; “tactical and strategic management,” which would address long-term organizational and spatial needs; and the “interdependency of people, process and place” in the workplace.Footnote ⁴⁴ They were thus also sharing their philosophy of facility management with their consulting clients, and embedding those ideas in their analysis and recommendations. Perhaps not surprisingly, their recommendations to consulting clients often encouraged them to invest more money in their facilities, whether that meant buying new furniture or creating a more robust facility management division to handle organizational needs.

The mantra of people, process, and place was also a key part of their educational programs. As early as 1981, they introduced their core course, “Managing Effective Workplaces,” as one that would help participants learn these three core elements of facility management, and help them to “establish policies that bring together and manage people, work processes, and the physical workspace.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In their 1983 brochure, that same session, renamed “Managing Today’s Workplace,” was even described as the “peopleprocessplace™ [sic]” course, and used that framework to organize all of the major topics covered in the program.Footnote ⁴⁶ Writing in 2024, former FMI participant Mary Gauer described how important their concept of people, process, place had been to her own early development as a facility manager. As she describes, “it wasn’t simply about the envelope, heating, cooling, and cleaning, but meeting the needs of the people.” FMI emphasized the idea that facility managers “needed to understand the people who work for them and within their buildings.”Footnote ⁴⁷

To help its participants fully understand their core concept, FMI also developed experiential games that modeled their approach. For example, their “Facility Management Laboratory Game” was created with researchers at the University of Michigan to teach facility managers how to coordinate worker needs (people), organizational priorities (process), and the limits of space and resources (place). Players were divided into different roles, including an operations manager and a facility manager, who in turn were overseeing a group of workers at a fictional company over a ten-year period. The game was conducted using components of Herman Miller’s furniture, including chairs, partitions, tables, and shelves, which were moved and adjusted throughout the game in response to changing working conditions. From the start, there were not enough resources to do the work required, so the facility manager began their job with a crisis, which in turn required them to make an adjustment to the game space. Each stage of gameplay then introduced a new challenge for the facility manager; for example, corporate restructuring required the facility manager to move one person and one chair to a new position, while a change in job description would require the manager to move people around, but not their chairs. The operations manager also had distinct tasks and could make strategic choices to withhold certain game pieces to later rounds, which represented long-term planning. Meanwhile, workers could only stay put and respond to changes to their space or process dictated to them by the facility manager or the operations manager. As they worked, their behaviors and reactions also had symbolic meaning—accidentally dropping a game piece on the floor represented lost information (and could not be retrieved); talking was permitted but could be a “mixed blessing” when workers began shouting across the room, representing the breakdown of communication in the organization. According to the game description, it was ultimately the role of the facility manager figure to “coordinate the people, place, and process issues of the organization into a workable, and even more importantly, a productive mix.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The real lessons of the game, however, were in the failures. It was explicitly designed to be frustrating to all of the players and to show in microcosm some of the ways in which space and organizational changes could positively and negatively affect the workplace and the workers. In their third running of the game in 1981, Cecil Williams documented the overheard comments from players, including the workers complaining to management about not being heard, and managers demanding that their employees work harder to achieve the game’s output goals.Footnote ⁴⁹ For Williams and the FMI team, these overheard comments reflected the success of the game in communicating these ideas and illustrating the problems that can emerge over time in facility management, but they also revealed the importance of facility management itself through its strategic integration of people, process, and place.

Designing Facility Management

In tandem with modeling their concept of people, process, place, the FMI also sought to cultivate a design perspective in the field of facility management, emphasizing the utility of design as a tool for observing, assessing, and transforming the use of space. Among their early surveys of the field of facility management, FMI found that the majority of facility managers working in the early 1980s had a business and management background rather than from design, architecture, or engineering. Yet, this research also showed that these individuals had significant influence on important design decisions including the management of interior installations, interior planning and layout, furniture selection, architectural design, facility planning and construction, and the analysis of facility needs and priorities.Footnote ⁵⁰ Recognizing this gap between their background and their growing responsibilities, FMI used their courses and publications to foster a greater awareness of design methods and concepts. Their observational and experimental approach to facility management was modeled on the kinds of research conducted by the FMI itself as well as by the Herman Miller Research Corporation, whose design research remained integral to the work of FMI. This emphasis on design methods also served to promote Herman Miller’s own office products and research on the workplace as useful and meaningful solutions to facility problems.

FMI seminars often featured design researchers from Herman Miller’s research division as presenters of key concepts and ideas. For example, their 1984 seminar on office automation included presentations by Michael Wodka and Jon Ryburg discussing their respective findings on office automation. Both men had significant experience researching office automation, but Wodka had been a design researcher for Herman Miller Research Corporation and had even worked with Robert Propst (creator of Action Office) on acoustics and energy distribution for Action Office. The seminar included a session on “the workstation” which emphasized Wodka’s expertise on the technical requirements of the office interior in terms of acoustics and energy management, but also would likely have highlighted furniture solutions to those problems and featured products designed for Herman Miller’s Action Office.Footnote ⁵¹ The program thus reframed the technical problems of office automation as a design issue that could be adequately addressed through the selection of appropriate furniture components.

FMI also sought to promote a design perspective and approach to the work of facility management, particularly through observation and proactive experimentation to identify problems and find solutions. For example, FMI encouraged its participants to not just immediately react to requests for space changes, but rather to take time to truly understand the source of the issue and make strategic corrections that would get to the root of the problem. In their 1983 report “The Growing Facility Manager,” FMI critiqued those who simply focused on putting out fires in the office and celebrated those who intervened in the office in a proactive or even speculative way. Observing a group of salesmen chatting regularly by the coffee maker, a proactive facility manager would provide that group with their own meeting space adjacent to their work area. Noticing equipment being misused, the good facility manager would try to find why that equipment was being misused. In a conversation about low productivity, the facility manager might conduct a space study to see how the office traffic patterns might be improved.Footnote ⁵² This approach reflects the design research practices of both FMI and the Herman Miller Research Corporation, which frequently relied on observation and experimentation as a means of identifying and defining problems and finding suitable design solutions.

As part of their design focus, FMI also emphasized the value of user participation and encouraged their workshop participants to take time to include workers in the design process. In fact, user participation was a central tenet of the original open plan concepts as they were first promoted, and was even embedded in the concept of Action Office, which was designed to allow users to manage and adapt their own spaces.Footnote ⁵³ Notably, management experts of the era also championed the idea of worker inclusion as a means of promoting organizational innovation and growth.Footnote ⁵⁴ Porting this concept into their facility management training, FMI encouraged its participants and subscribers to invest time in understanding the needs and priorities of workers. For example, in an article in their newsletter from 1985, they stated unequivocally, “because of the changing nature of work and the work force, facility managers won’t be able to make effective decisions about the work environment without employee participation.” The article includes numerous examples of the important lessons and information gleaned from these kinds of participatory activities. At one organization, user participation in the design process revealed the need for locking desks, a priority that had not been understood by the facilities team. In another instance, employees involved with the planning were able to understand the trade-offs necessary in the design, and were happier in the end with their workspaces having been involved in those choices from the beginning.Footnote ⁵⁵ To model this idea in their workshops, FMI even worked with researchers at the University of Michigan in 1983 to create an interactive game which demonstrated this very concept for one of their consulting clients. Called “The Workstation Game,” the activity was designed to reflect the process of negotiating between formal “design standards” created by organizations and the needs and preferences of workers whose priorities might be different from the established standards. The game board (Figure 3) shows the workstation and the organization locked together like twin puzzle pieces nested at its center, and surrounded by important design considerations such as enclosure, aesthetics, and equipment alongside organizational issues including facilities, HVAC, and services. The design of the board presents these diverse elements of the workplace in tension with each other, helping its players to situate each individual worker’s priorities and needs within a broader social and spatial context.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such activities underscored design as a user-centered process that required input from workers to be successful.

Figure 3.

The game board for the Workstation Game shows different elements related to workplace planning, including components of the individual workstation such as seating, enclosure, work surface, equipment, and storage, alongside organizational issues such as HVAC, facilities, location, services, and participation. Image courtesy of Herman Miller Archives.

Figure 3. Long description

A line drawing of a game board layout.

* At the center is a small square with interlocking geometric lines.

* The next layer outward is a dark grey square divided into two sections labeled WORKSTATION on the top half and ORGANIZATION on the bottom half.

* Surrounding this core is a large grid of rectangular cells.

* The top row contains three horizontal rectangles labeled AESTHETICS, AMBIENCE, and ENCLOSURE.

* The second row contains three horizontal rectangles labeled EQUIPMENT, FLOOR AREA, and SEATING.

* To the left of the center core are two horizontal rectangles labeled STORAGE and WORK SURFACE.

* To the right of the center core are two vertical rectangles labeled DENSITY and FACILITIES.

* The bottom section consists of six vertical rectangles arranged side-by-side. From left to right, they are labeled H V A C, IMAGE, LOCATION, PARTICIPATION, SERVICES, and STYLE.

* The title THE WORKSTATION GAME is centered at the top. Small text in the upper right corner credits Nancy Kates with Betty Hase. Copyright information for the Facility Management Institute is printed along the bottom edge.

This emphasis on design practice in facility management was connected to a broader philosophy of facility management that focused on the value of continuous space change as a means of improving the office and the work of the organization. In their brochure for their foundational seminar titled “Managing Today’s Workplace,” FMI described the need to recognize the value of space change and described facility managers as change agents who played an essential role in identifying the need for space changes and facilitating those changes.Footnote ⁵⁷ As part of that change process, facility managers were encouraged to continuously evaluate the success of the space through post-occupancy evaluations, and make further adjustments as needed to address emerging issues. As FMI staff member Mado Kreutz describes, “after the inevitable fine adjustment are made, an assessment of the overall change is a final, crucial communication effort.” According to Kreutz, even just an informal walk-through and conversation with users could be a useful way to evaluate the success of a project.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such efforts emphasized an iterative approach to office planning and design that encouraged adaptation and ongoing change over time.

These practices, which so strategically foregrounded design concepts and design methods, were also intended to make facility managers better clients and better allies for architects and designers. At the time, architects and designers were increasingly concerned about the influence of facility managers on corporate architecture. In a two-part 1985 article for Architectural Record, reporter Ann Nydele described the growing anxiety in the architecture and design community about their loss of position and authority in corporate projects. Where in the past architects would work directly with leadership to guide and shape a corporate project, they were frequently working exclusively with facility management teams with very limited access to top decision-makers. For some architects, this represented a loss of control over corporate projects, which were often subjected to close oversight by these new facility management divisions who expected architects to report and account for their time and expenses in minute detail.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the follow-up article, Nydele provided an extended interview with architect Arthur Gensler, who discussed his own concerns about facility management, particularly noting the fact that facility managers often had little background in architecture and design and so were not always well prepared to manage large building projects.Footnote ⁶⁰ In response to this pair of articles, FMI’s newsletter argued that architects and designers needed to accept facility managers, but also that facility managers needed the work and expertise of architects and designers to be effective. As the newsletter describes, while facility managers and architects and designers have different focuses and priorities, they both seek to “humanize the working environment, to produce more functional and pleasing facilities for people [emphasis in original],” and that shared purpose was critical to their effective collaboration.Footnote ⁶¹

This focus on design concepts and methods in FMI’s trainings was intended to position the facility manager as an ideal mediator between organizational needs and architecture and design practice. Describing the complexity of a corporate building project, David Armstrong noted that architects and designers were just one of a number of different experts vying to give advice to organizations. In this context, he argued, “the key to success is an advocate on the inside.” In his analysis, facility managers were the ideal “knowledgeable receivers” who could provide an insider’s view of the organization to architects and, in turn, communicate the value of architects’ and designers’ work back to the organization. In fact, Armstrong even argued that one of the key jobs of a facility manager is to “sell the solution to the corporation for implementation.” The result of this process is a solution that is tailored to the organization, and that is supported by an insider in a position to influence their leadership.Footnote ⁶² The lesson of this is that the facility manager was not a threat to design expertise, but rather a partner in helping to promote and support that expertise internally.

Promoting Facility Management

Across all of their activities, including education, consulting, and research, FMI’s overarching goal was to promote the field of facility management, raising its visibility within organizations, and ultimately developing a dedicated professional organization to support and expand its reach. From the very beginning, media outreach was a top priority as it served to promote the work of the institute as well as articulate the value and purpose of facility management as a field of professional practice. They maintained a regular bibliography tracking all of the interviews, stories, and references to FMI across all kinds of media, including trade periodicals, mainstream news organizations, and academic research.Footnote ⁶³ In all of this media activity, FMI was helping to explain facility management, justify its value, and encourage both organizations and architects and designers to accept their expertise and position. For example, in November of 1981, Interiors magazine ran a feature on FMI and its director, David Armstrong, describing the emergence of facility management and its growing prominence in corporate design. The story foregrounds the rapid transformation of organizations, the increasing costs of offices, and the emerging concerns embedded in office planning and design, such as communication and technology, to explain the need for facility management as a field.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1982, Armstrong even contributed a regular column to Interiors titled “Dear Dave,” in which Armstrong responded to readers’ questions about facility management. In his very first column, he addressed the anxiety of a newly minted facility manager who was struggling with their job by giving them an outline of how to get started in their role, how to cultivate their position and their relationships, and how to develop a deeper understanding of facilities as an area of expertise.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this way, Armstrong positioned himself as a kind of ambassador for facility management in the press, and sought to use these media opportunities to justify facility management and support its expansion.

This intensive media exposure was meant to increase the visibility of facility management and help facility managers justify the value of facilities and facilities management to organizational leadership. In his second column for Interiors, Armstrong discussed the qualitative benefits of a well-designed office for workers and argued that facility managers could also look at “space slippage” to illustrate the value of space and to help articulate the losses that come with poorly managed offices. Showing their executives the gap between the established space standards and the actual use of space could highlight the increased costs and loss of revenue that come with a lack of facility planning. While discouraging the idea of “squeezing people in like sardines,” he noted that using slippage as a means of explaining the value of space could help quantify facilities and support greater investment in its management.Footnote ⁶⁶ This effort to calculate the value of space became a regular strategy in FMI seminars as well. For example, in their long-range planning sessions they had their participants conduct a “Real Estate Financial Analysis” using a special workbook designed to guide them through a cost/benefit evaluation of their own facilities.Footnote ⁶⁷ Armed with their completed workbook, participants would return to their own offices ready to talk about the value of a capital investment in facilities to their chief executive. FMI thus encouraged facility managers to find ways to articulate their value that would resonate with corporate leadership and increase the visibility of their work. They actively coached their participants on these efforts, persuading them to not only recognize their own value to the organization, but giving them language and tools for making their work legible and valuable to their leadership.

Underpinning this effort to raise the visibility of facility management was a larger interest in increasing the status and influence of facility managers within their respective organizations. From FMI’s early years of operation, this idea of moving facility management up the organizational hierarchy was embedded in its program, including its research and educational seminars. For example, in its 1980 report “Growing into Facilities Management,” FMI proposed a theory of evolution for facility management within organizations that stretched from its initial introduction in Stage 1 through its ultimate promotion of facility management to an executive-level function in Stage 4. As the report notes, this elevation of facility management to the executive level was a reflection of the organization’s recognition of the importance of facilities to the strategic direction of the organization. In this final stage, facility management shifts from putting out fires to long-term planning and strategic management, allowing the facilities division to not only forecast space needs, but also to become key decision makers.Footnote ⁶⁸

This research became an important touchstone at FMI, not only for describing the trajectory of facility management as a field, but as an aspirational tool for facilities managers to grow their own positions and increase the size and scope of their units. For example, in 1981 they used this model as the basis for a “facility management quiz” for Interiors, inviting readers to assess the status of their own organization’s facilities team or that of a client. Questions focused on space planning, leadership, and financial responsibilities to assess the state of facilities management at a given organization.Footnote ⁶⁹ Readers could send their quiz responses to Interiors, and the results were published in the March 1982 edition, which went on to describe the distinct characteristics of the stages of facilities management from the uncoordinated Stage 1 to the most “mature” facility management programs of Stage 4, which has a high degree of long-range planning and coordination. According to the article, most of the respondents were in the first three stages, with very few respondents qualifying for the most advanced stage.Footnote ⁷⁰ The framing of this as a model of growth emphasizes the idea that achieving the highest level (stage 4) should be the ultimate goal for most facility managers no matter where they worked.

While most of FMI’s work focused on educating and supporting facility managers, they also had some programming and materials that were specifically targeted to executives to help draw attention to the importance of space issues. For example, in 1983, the FMI organized an “executive forum” featuring Peter Drucker, a well-known management writer and consultant. The event included lectures from Drucker about the changes in society, the economy, and white-collar work, alongside dedicated sessions from various executives and leaders at both Herman Miller and FMI with topics about assessing workplace performance and the role of facilities in creating corporate culture. According to the printed proceedings, the goal of this program was to give executives a better sense of the role of the office in the future of work, and to reinforce the idea that facilities were corporate assets that could contribute to the return on investment. Finally, the session underscored the importance of “executive decision making in the planning process.”Footnote ⁷¹ The implication of this was not only that executives should consider the facility an important asset, but also that they should make space for the facility manager within their ranks as an important contributor to the organization and its future. In fact, from the founding of the FMI, one of their main objectives was to “raise corporate awareness of facility management as a legitimate function in corporate decision making.”Footnote ⁷²

Alongside these other efforts, FMI also sought to support the creation of a dedicated professional organization focused on facility management. As they describe in an early brochure, “such a group, operating independently of the institute, will help build the professional standing and identity of persons fulfilling the facility management role. It will encourage the exchange of experiences, ideas, and management information and result in the long-term advancement of facility management as a professional discipline.”Footnote ⁷³ For FMI, the creation of a professional organization would help solidify the field of facility management, expand its reach, and ensure its visibility. In fact, the seeds of the National Facility Management Association (NFMA) were planted at the 1978 seminar on facilities and productivity led by HMRC. Several individuals at that event, including David Armstrong, Charles Hitch of the National Bank of Detroit, and George Graves of Texas Eastern Transmission Company, worked together to organize a meeting in 1979, which led to the development of the framework that would ultimately create NFMA, founded in 1980.Footnote ⁷⁴ The first annual meeting of the NFMA in 1980 was hosted by FMI, and the majority of the 47 people who attended that first meeting also participated in an FMI seminar held just two days before.Footnote ⁷⁵ From its founding, NFMA was closely connected to FMI—not only were core members of NFMA also part of FMI, but the new organization also shared offices with FMI in Ann Arbor and relied on some of FMI’s staff to support the organization and to develop their database.Footnote ⁷⁶ The NFMA was renamed the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) in 1982 after the establishment of a Canadian chapter.Footnote ⁷⁷ FMI clearly shaped the foundations and structure of IFMA from the beginning, not only materially, but also philosophically. In 1983, IFMA established its own ethical standards for facility management that included an emphasis on the integration of “people, process, and place” as a defining goal and purpose of the field as a whole.Footnote ⁷⁸ Former IFMA fellow George Trayer credited Herman Miller with the development and eventual success of IFMA, arguing that if they hadn’t played such an important role in building the organization, it would never have existed.Footnote ⁷⁹

In 1986, Herman Miller was facing significant competition in the contract furniture market and was struggling to remain profitable. In its sixth year of operation, FMI was still not financially independent of their parent company, despite its active consulting and education programs. Looking to make strategic cuts, Herman Miller felt that FMI had fulfilled their main goal of establishing facility management, and the program was no longer necessary.Footnote ⁸⁰ At its closure, FMI celebrated the founding and growth of IFMA as one of its most significant accomplishments. With its move from Ann Arbor to Houston in 1984, IFMA had finally succeeded “in putting enough distance between itself and Herman Miller to become legitimate.” Its membership had more than tripled, even as Herman Miller and FMI were still recognized as the “parent” of IFMA and received “kudos for courage and vision.”Footnote ⁸¹ Herman Miller also donated significant materials to IFMA, including FMI’s research publications and database as well as funding for a permanent position at IFMA to make the material available to its members.Footnote ⁸² By 1992, IFMA’s membership had surpassed 10,000, and it had held its very first international conference in Brussels.Footnote ⁸³

Financing Facilities

The closure of FMI as a result of budget concerns was perhaps itself a harbinger of the transformation in the professional discipline that they had helped create. At its dissolution, FMI held a final two-day symposium titled “What’s Next for Facilities Management” in October of 1986 at the University of Michigan. The event brought together a group of experts and practitioners in the field to think about the present and future of facilities management. One of the recurring themes across many of the talks was the idea that facility management must respond to and prioritize the interests of the organization, particularly its economic concerns. In his talk, Cecil Williams, a former director of FMI, argued that facility managers must serve the interests, priorities, and goals of the organization. According to Williams, facility management must keep the financial health of the organization in the foreground and must position facilities as a partner in improving the bottom line of the organization through optimizing the use of space, reducing costs, or increasing productivity. In his words, “financial management skills must be part of the facility management function.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Although still emphasizing the importance of serving and supporting workers, Williams argued that for facility management to raise its status and position, it must work to benefit the organization financially by increasing productivity and efficiency and by reducing costs. Such framing suggests that even the leadership of FMI was aware that the tide of facility management as a field was moving away from a human-centered focus to a more financially minded discipline.

By the mid-1980s, facility management had become a formally recognized professional field. In addition to the significant growth and independence of IFMA, other furniture manufacturers had also established their own facility management divisions, often within their marketing departments, and were also actively involved with IFMA. There were also new professional journals associated with the field, including the British journal Facilities, established in 1980, and the American trade journal Facilities Design & Management, which was first published in January 1982. Multiple schools, including Cornell University, Michigan State, University of Texas, and Grand Valley State, had also developed their own dedicated facility management degrees and programs, and these too helped to formalize the field and promote its importance as a domain of management expertise.Footnote ⁸⁵ All of these illustrate the growing professionalization of facility management, and the emergence of new voices in the field including scholars and academics, journalists, manufacturers, and practitioners who were actively shaping the discipline.

Meanwhile, even as the field itself had become more established, facility managers also were increasingly caught in the crosswinds of significant organizational, technological, and economic changes. In his book The Total Workplace, Franklin Becker, a professor of facility management at Cornell, argued that there were five main factors that led to the rapid growth of facility management in organizations in the 1980s, not just in the U.S. but around the world. Among these were the growth of information technology and computers in the office, increased employee expectations, increased global competition, and rising real estate prices.Footnote ⁸⁶ A host of new regulations at the federal, state, and local levels related to ergonomics, air quality, and accessibility also created new obligations and challenges for facility divisions that in turn often required organizational, spatial, and material interventions to avoid the threat of legal action.Footnote ⁸⁷ Facility management guides of the 1980s and 1990s often toggled between big picture issues facing facility managers such as real estate portfolios and project management and their day-to-day operational, technical, and maintenance tasks and responsibilities.Footnote ⁸⁸ Space remained a strategic asset, but its utility and value to the organization was rapidly shifting. Navigating these new demands and pressures from both above and below, facility managers often adopted a more economic focus that sought to leverage the value of space to serve organizational priorities for increased profitability and reduced overhead costs.

In his book Economies of Design, Guy Julier argues that the New Economy of that era was shaped by increasing deregulation, increasing global competition, and the emphasis on property as investment capital. On the one hand, organizations recognized property as a kind of investment, but they were also increasingly concerned with financial liquidity, leading to a desire to divest from ownership. According to Julier, the global push toward deregulation reshaped the marketplace in both the U.S. and the U.K. The new economy emphasized flexible labor structures, for example, creating a greater reliance on contract and temporary labor and shrinking the number of regular employees. Design was a tool of these very systems, often deployed to support and enhance these emerging austerity measures. Spatial planning in particular became a means of cutting costs and managing declines, cutting and rearranging space to reflect these shifting priorities and investments.Footnote ⁸⁹ Julier’s description maps the transformation seen among facility managers who were focused on bottom-line measures, using new methods of design and planning to reshape organizational space to meet these increasing financial pressures.

As part of this larger shift, trade journals often encouraged facility managers to think about their work and its value as it related to the financial success of the organization as a whole. For example, editor-in-chief of Facilities Design and Management, Anne Fallucchi, encouraged her readers to adopt the language of “asset management” to communicate the value and importance of their own work. Quoting a VP at Citibank, she told her readers, “Don’t ‘move 5,000 boxes.’ Do ‘manage timely relocation of 1,000 employees to minimize lost efficiency of the $50 million corporate payroll.’”Footnote ⁹⁰ Others encouraged facility managers to use modern budgeting and accounting methods to better advocate for the value of investments in space.Footnote ⁹¹ Such efforts promised to help facility managers make their work more visible to top executives, and showcase the value of facilities management to the bottom line. This framing also operationalized facility management and shifted the focus away from the purpose or value of their work as it served workers and toward a careful cost accounting of the labor expenditures of space moves.

With increased visibility in their organizations, corporate leaders expected facility managers to also demonstrate how investments in space could directly affect profitability, productivity, and cost-savings. To this end, consultants, journalists, and other experts in the field often encouraged facility managers to audit their performance, tracking benchmarks related to budgets and operating costs and determining to what extent facility management divisions were meeting business objectives. As former FMI staffer Jon Ryburg argued, such accounting could provide “tangible evidence that facility management functions contribute to planned increased in market growth, share, income, productivity-output, and savings, all of which contribute to profitability, competitiveness, and business success.”Footnote ⁹² In his 1992 article “How to Win Over the CEO on Key FM Issues,” for Facilities Design & Management, former IFMA president Gerald Hubbard similarly argued that facility managers needed to utilize data to demonstrate their contribution to the bottom line, and show their value by demonstrating how their work contributes directly to organizational performance and profitability. He emphasized that facility managers needed to be more strategically focused to better speak to the expectations and needs of the executive suite.Footnote ⁹³ This focus on tracking facility data also affected the work of consulting architects and designers who increasingly found themselves subject to intense scrutiny over their costs and procedures, sometimes even expected to report their activities on a daily basis.Footnote ⁹⁴ For example, in a 1987 article for Architectural Record, Eric Teicholz and Michael Sena described how corporate clients were demanding “a growing maze” of data including “‘cost center’ budgeting, departmental charge-backs for space and furniture, equipment inventories for depreciation, and asset management.” While the introduction of CAD and other computer systems facilitated this process, that too created new challenges as architects and designers struggled to reframe their work in these new terms.Footnote ⁹⁵

Organizational leadership was also putting more pressure on facility managers to cut operational costs, often while expecting them to increase their services.Footnote ⁹⁶ Through the 1980s and 1990s, as companies were dramatically changing their organizations to adapt to the new economic environment, they were also making changes to their operations in order to become “lean and mean” by reducing overhead and downsizing their staff. Companies celebrated their flexibility by relying on temporary, part-time, and contract labor, thereby reducing their core workers and only bringing “outworkers” in for specific projects or tasks as needed.Footnote ⁹⁷ These organizational changes directly affected the work of facility managers. As an article from 1994 in Facilities Design and Management argued, a growing number of facility and real estate managers were adopting “the three Cs of the 1990 corporate philosophy: Cut resources, Consolidate staff, Contribute to the bottom line.” This in turn meant that many were facing significant tactical challenges as they struggled to get out of leases, get rid of real estate, renegotiate rents, manage constant space changes, and reduce operational and maintenance expenses.Footnote ⁹⁸ Facility divisions also began shifting some of their own work from in-house services to outsourcing. As reporter Dana Dubbs noted, outsourcing core services including maintenance, security, food services, groundskeeping, and housekeeping could save money by lowering labor costs, reducing benefits and pay, reducing investments in tools and equipment, and reducing time spent on recruiting, managing, and training.Footnote ⁹⁹ By the early 1990s, some architecture and design firms even offered facility management services, essentially outsourcing many of the core operational functions of facility management itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

All of these changes, in turn, fundamentally transformed the design and planning of corporate architecture. Although companies were still investing in the construction of new buildings, there was a significant shift in the style and purpose of these new corporate offices. In 1985, architect Arthur Gensler noted that organizations were increasingly trying to insulate themselves from risk, which meant that they did not have the “luxury” of making the architecture too specific or unique to their needs.Footnote ¹⁰¹ While in the past companies had often sought to create architecture that was expressive of their culture, identity, and aspirations, many office buildings of this era were designed to be intentionally generic. In his article “Office Intrigues,” Thomas Hine noted that by the 1990s, corporate culture had become a liability at a time when companies were being continuously bought and sold, merged and acquired, created and destroyed in rapid succession.Footnote ¹⁰² For example, the Union Carbide corporate office in Danbury, Connecticut, designed by Kevin Roche and completed in 1982, was put on the market just four years later as the company’s fortunes sank in the aftermath of a horrific chemical accident in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands in 1984. The building that had been widely celebrated at its opening for its unusual dendritic form, so carefully tailored to Union Carbide’s own corporate culture and needs, was quickly rendered obsolete and even became a boondoggle that struggled to find tenants in large part because of its design. By the 1990s, Union Carbide had become a morality tale of the financial hazards of a bespoke corporate office.Footnote ¹⁰³

Some in the industry argued that new buildings should be constructed with a broad remit so as not to foreclose on a future in which leasing out or even selling the building entirely might be necessary.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This meant that some corporate buildings were even planned from the beginning primarily for tenants rather than for a company’s own workforce. As Carol Willis argues in her book Form Follows Finance, speculative skyscrapers are practically as old as the skyscraper itself, and throughout the twentieth century, expectations of the market in a particular place often shaped the design of these buildings.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the 1980s and 1990s, this practice rebounded with some companies strategically prioritizing tenants over their own workers. Reporter Claudia Deutsch described how the Equitable Insurance Company had constructed a new building in midtown Manhattan in 1986 that was designed primarily to attract tenants. Just 10 years later, the company, though still the owner, was leaving the building almost entirely to take leased offices in a less expensive space. In Deutsch’s words, “trophy buildings are out and frugality and the bottom line are in.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

As part of the larger effort to disinvest from real estate, a growing number of corporate facility managers began integrating new “alternative office” concepts into their workplaces. These new office concepts were widely used in North America and Europe, with one survey conducted by IFMA in 1996 reporting that some 80 percent of organizations surveyed were already using alternative office strategies, and 95 percent reported that they anticipated adopting some aspect of alternative office design in the future.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ While often touted by architects, designers, and furniture manufacturers as a progressive solution that offered workers greater flexibility and choice, these new design concepts were frequently implemented by organizations in ways that were intended primarily to cut space, cut costs, limit personalization, and make it easier to move workers with minimum disruption.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Some organizations began implementing a practice known as the “universal plan” in which all of the workstations were fixed and identical, reducing the need to make space changes. Because all of the workstations were the same, workers could easily be moved quickly with no furniture or equipment changes required. Writing in 1998, Jon Ryburg noted that companies using this method typically reported the least amount of churn (movement of office furniture), even as their workers were relocated at a very high percentage.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The other type of alternative office that became popular in this period was the non-territorial office, in which organizations eliminated assigned workstations entirely. These kinds of offices could have a smaller footprint because they were built on the assumption that not all workers needed to be in the office every day, so there were fewer workstations overall (often not even enough for all workers). In addition, the workstations themselves could be smaller in size because they did not require all of the storage space of a regular workstation. Some of these offices augmented the available workspace with different kinds of environments, including meeting rooms, lounge areas, and cafes that were meant to be used as alternative workspaces. In this way, workers were meant to stay nomadic even in the office itself, shifting from location to location for different types of work throughout the day. Other organizations encouraged telecommuting, pushing their staff to work on the road, at clients’ offices, or from home, which also helped reduce the cost of space.Footnote ¹¹⁰

These examples not only illustrate the efforts to rationalize space and reduce cost but also show how these changes to space were also fundamentally changes to the work process as well. Policies about the design and use of space were directly connected to the structure and culture of the organization, management policies, and workers’ day-to-day working experience. While alternative office concepts were often framed as user-centered design solutions that would liberate workers from their workstations and give workers flexibility on where and how they worked, in practice workers did not generally enjoy feeling like nomads wandering in the office.Footnote ¹¹¹ Some of the earliest experiments with non-territorial offices were very poorly received by the workers, who craved a sense of ownership and more control over their working environment.Footnote ¹¹² Further, as office planning consultant Michael Brill argued in one of his regular columns for the trade magazine Interiors, many companies were asking for “alternative officing” in order to cut space and cut costs, not to improve the quality of work.Footnote ¹¹³

Not surprisingly, as companies sought to cut their space usage, they were also spending less money on office furniture. By the late 1980s, systems furniture companies were already seeing a drop-off in sales as corporate real estate development slowed.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the 1990s, the entire systems furniture industry was in upheaval as many of the major manufacturers saw a significant drop in sales and many of these companies struggled to remain profitable.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Facilities Design & Management ran multiple stories noting the “squeeze on manufacturers” who were offering ever deeper discounts to corporate clients in order to remain competitive, and documenting the rising popularity of refurbished and used furniture as both Herman Miller and Steelcase launched their own refurbishing subsidiaries to handle the growing demand.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Ironically, the field that systems furniture had made, in turn, had facilitated a strategic disinvestment in office space and office furnishings.

Reflecting on the maturation of facility management in the late 1990s, British architect Francis Duffy noted that facility managers at that time had a better understanding of costs in use, reporting procedures and monitoring practices, yet he also noted that despite the interest among some facility managers in improving the quality and effectiveness of the workplace, others had become “downright retrogressive, even by Taylorism standards.” In his words, “facilities managers, like architects, are sometimes tempted to deliver what they find easy to deliver—rather than what the clients or users really want.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Others in the industry argued that facility managers had become so focused on the bottom line and the financial concerns of the organization that they were rendering their own positions nearly obsolete.Footnote ¹¹⁸