Author: Tim Sullivan

By all reports, Tesla Motor’s Model S is a remarkable car. It has been ranked as car of the year by a number of automotive outlets, and one friend of mine who lives in San Francisco has gloated noisily about his chance to drive it.

A brouhaha has sprung up around the car thanks to an unfavorable New York Times review by John Broder. Broder claimed that the car’s battery rapidly lost it charge in the cold and left him stranded, more or less, on his trip from Washington, DC, to Boston, limping from charging station to charging station as he called Tesla for help.

Tesla founder Elon Musk replied on the company’s website. And Musk brought a bunch of data with him to support his claim that Broder “faked” the review. Broder, in turn, has issued a detailed rebuttal of Musk’s data. Margaret Sullivan (no relation), the Times public editor, has tweeted that she’s “on it.”

The company has responded aggressively to criticism in the past, suing the BBC show “Top Gear” in 2011 over a 2008 review of the car; the case was tossed out of court. And, for what it’s worth, Fortune’s reviewer encountered similar problems with range and battery life.

The controversy will continue, as these things do, and Tesla’s stock price will dip and recover and dip again.

But let’s take a step back and consider the nature of the controversy, which I think is rooted in the way many inventors approach innovation. Tesla is run by visionary engineers. Musk was a co-founder of PayPal and is the chief designer at SpaceX, overseeing development of rockets and spacecraft. Other executives have similarly impressive backgrounds at Apple and in the aerospace and automotive industries. I would wager that they all love to drive.

Perhaps this is the root of the problem. The Tesla team have built a car to satisfy themselves, which means that they’ve focused on the customer as driver not on the customer as a whole individual. That’s the tension I see in the original Broder review: great driving, bad transportation. Tesla’s goal is to sell 20,000 units of the Model S and they are promoting it as a “normal-use” car. Will anyone put up with the hassle? Was this normal use part of their early goal or did they just geek out on an awesome car?

Based on reviews of an earlier model, the Tesla Roadster, I would guess that there’s a heavy element of geeking out involved.

Being focused in your vision can be a good thing. It sets limits, and Tesla’s design successes have quelled any fears that car lovers might have had that global warming was going to take their fun away. But that same focus has meant that when it came time to expand, Tesla didn’t properly consider a host of issues that stand in the way of the everyday use of the car — like convenience, charge time, inclement weather, and so on.

Many would-be innovators suffer the same problem. They develop a cool technology that is, they’re convinced, going to change the way you live. For them, the reasons for adoption are self-evident. The technology is so useful, revolutionary, endearing, cool, that it becomes almost literally blinding. Why wouldn’t anyone want to use this, whatever it takes? the inventor thinks. My product will overwhelm you with its awesomeness.

But consumers rarely want to change their behaviors to adopt your cool tech. They want you to identify and solve their problem, cheaply and efficiently.

People have been trying to reform the office, it seems, since the office first appeared. Who was A Christmas Carol’s Bob Cratchit but an early office reformer, whining for heat so that his ink didn’t freeze? Office reformers of today point to trends like hotelling, co-working, and (my personal favorite) working from home — worthy endeavors, all. Maybe not as worthy as central heat, but pretty good ideas nonetheless.

But maybe we can learn a lesson from the humble cubicle. No one sets out to design the most hated office furniture of all time, unless perhaps you work for the Spanish Inquisition, and the cubicle is no exception. Originally intended to free office workers from their hierarchical, codified drudgery of an existence (can’t you just taste the irony?), the cubicle has become universally loathed.

The Herman Miller furniture company introduced the innovation in 1964 as “the world’s first open-plan office system of reconfigurable components and a bold departure from the era’s fixed assumptions of what office furniture should be.” A team led by Robert Propst, the company’s head of research, and George Nelson, the company’s director of design realized the flexible workspace. Propst was the consummate inventor, with many patents to his name, while Nelson is almost single-handedly responsible for the look and feel of the modern office.

The original cubicle, named the Action Office, was intended to give office workers more space than the so-called bullpen office that assigned one worker to one smallish desk. With more work spread out before them, more space for filing, with desks that adjusted heights, the designers reasoned, individuals were bound to be more productive. The design — which included two desks, a couple of chairs, a small table, and some vertical filing stands — even accommodated working while standing up. It is a glory to behold (you can see a picture of here, in the fifth slide), especially when you work in an office where people stack up books to create their own standing desks. The Action Office was a great idea.

It was also a flop.

It was too expensive and difficult to assemble, and the requisite square footage per employee made it poorly suited to large organizations. So Propst and the designers went back to the drawing board, producing in 1968 the Action Office II, which corrected the perceived deficiencies of the first version. Each employee got one desk, and the addition of low walls afforded some privacy and contained each worker. It also meant that more desks could be crammed closer together while still allowing neighbors to interact. . . . I’m not going to spell it out; you can see where this is going.

Soon people were writing novels about veal-fattening pens, making videos of cubicle hurdles, inventing cubicle periscopes, and recommending that you not “prairie dog.” IDEO even designed Dilbert’s Ultimate Cubicle for Scott Adams.

George Nelson, Herman Miller’s design director, was so disgusted that he left the project well before the Action Office II went to market. And even Robert Propst, before he died in 2000, bemoaned his contribution to what he called “monolithic insanity.”

This short history isn’t meant to be totally depressing or enervating. After all, offices have changed radically, and often for the better, since 1964. But it should serve as a reminder that organizing comes with costs. It’s up to us to recognize what they are before we dive, willy-nilly, into any reform effort. If you don’t, you might end up with something that looks like this.