Since the dawn of the white-collar age, office designs have cycled through competing demands: openness versus privacy, interaction versus autonomy. Here’s a brief history of how seating arrangements have reflected our changing attitudes toward work.

As a positive counterpoint to my list of why managers become assholes, and as a counterbalance to my tendency to write cynically, here’s a list of why people become great at managing others, trying as much as possible not to just do the stupid thing and invert my other list.

What would someone who was the opposite of hapless be like? They’d be relentlessly resourceful. Not merely relentless. That’s not enough to make things go your way except in a few mostly uninteresting domains. In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Which means you can’t simply plow through them, because you don’t know initially how hard they are; you don’t know whether you’re about to plow through a block of foam or granite. So you have to be resourceful. You have to have keep trying new things.

Be relentlessly resourceful.