Years ago in a famous speech Steve Jobs said that “death is the best invention of life”, that is, the most powerful agent of change because when someone – or something – dies, it opens the way to the future. Those words came to mind while reading about fine the WeWork: WeWork was one of the most celebrated startups of the past decade, having reached a value of almost 50 billion dollars. And a few days ago it started bankruptcy proceedings. Almost all Italian newspapers today talk about bankruptcy, because they translate literally, and badly, from English; but in Italy a bankruptcy occurs when a company fails because those who manage it have stolen the money; while bankruptcy is the certification that there is no longer the money to continue because the costs have systematically exceeded the income and the assets have dissolved. I’ll say it better: companies fail because the world changes and what seemed like a winning idea has become obsolete. In the case of WeWork the idea was the coworking, renting a desk in a nice place where you could meet other brilliant people who could help your ideas grow. The shared office was more than a rented desk, it was a life philosophy that was very successful for a while. But following the pandemic, the very idea of the office has entered into crisis: for many jobs, smart working has become the rule. The benefits of the flexibility of working from where we want – and when we want – outweigh the discomfort of the lack of daily human contact. For example, this didn’t happen with events: during the pandemic, events were all online and it was thought that even festivals would be held with avatars. But it was not so. We go to festivals and trade fairs even more than before, but we have decided to give up, whenever possible, the office, shared or not.
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