Over the past six months, my business partner and I have been on the road quite a bit, meeting with clients, friends, and prospects, and we’ve had the luck to see some of the greatest contemporary expressions of a rather ancient idea: the corporate campus. In an age where the distributed workforce is the controlling idea, there are a number of very large organizations thriving on the foundation of the well knit “society within society.” Some of the places we visited are famous for their campuses. There’s the Alcatel-Lucent campus – the former home of Bell Labs — in Murray Hill, New Jersey. There’s the General Mills complex in Golden Valley, Minnesota, a sprawling set of structures clustered around a large corporate commons (with the cafeteria and company store almost seamlessly connected like a super civilian commissary). But it’s not just old large companies, but new large companies as well. Most obvious example in the latter category is Google HQ in Mountain View. It is here that the word “campus” really comes alive. During my first visit to Google – just a couple of years ago – I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was at a college campus (except for all the security cameras — more about that later). And it’s probably because Google, like its corporate giant predecessors, understands that a happily captive workforce is a highly productive workforce.

***

But what about the rest of the corporate world – the many many companies that do not have the resources or inclination to build corporate campuses? There was a time when practically every Silicon Valley startup played the captive game, on a small scale – meals, snacks, foosball, whatever. And not all of it was manipulative. Ten years ago, I worked at a great startup, and they could afford the perks, so no one felt bad (not even the controller). But the problem with the captive game today is that there are not enough people around to hold captive. Too many people do their work on the road, or at home. And this is causing many managers to wonder about the cost for productivity – a hard item – and (the dreaded word) culture.

I believe that there are quite a few managers who are looking at ways to address these issues creatively, and the issues themselves have compelled numerous Web 2.0 companies to develop technology solutions. But not everyone is responding with the spirit of collaboration. Over the past few weeks, I have learned of several companies whose top managers are using older tech tools to manage staff the old-fashioned way: the punch clock. When an employee begins her workday, managers can see this, whether the employee is at the office or beginning her workday from home. Managers have had access to this kind of data for a very long time. What strikes me is that finally, after all these years, they are beginning to use this data, and with not much embarrassment. It’s easy to understand why they would do it; as managers they have an obligation to the firm to promote productivity. But, as anyone who has grown in a bad company town – despite the shining examples above, not all towns are good – surveillance is a blunt tool. And there’s little difference between the man who is peering over your shoulder, and the man who is watching the network. Both are in need of a better approach. For most of humanity, the punch clock expired a long time ago. We’ve evolved, and though it may be difficult to invent new tools for managing the distributed enterprise, defaulting to an older tool is unlikely to work.