I spent years working in offices, and for most of them, I quietly could not stand it.

Not the people. The people were some of the best I have known. It was the office itself. The thin carpet and the fluorescents humming. The sense that the room was built to pull work out of you and give nothing back.

I was standing in another kind of office this week, illustrating and painting a mural, and it is the first one that has ever made me realize…offices don’t have to be so dull and gray. There is another way.

The least corporate office

This is a cybersecurity shop.

Serious work, the kind that usually takes place in windowless rooms and with things nobody can talk about outside the office. You would expect gray carpet and worse. But as soon as you step in the door you see something is different here.

Instead, there is light everywhere. Open lines, high ceilings, a foosball table and a ping pong table, a central area with beer and root beer on tap. A guitar in the corner, a place to come together. And in and around all of it, people doing genuinely serious work.

It is the least corporate office I have ever set foot in, and the more time I spend here, the more I see that none of it is an accident.

The logic is simple. In this world, you can win an enormous contract and, almost overnight, need hundreds of people to deliver it. Winning the work is only half the battle. The other half is having somewhere those people actually want to come and stay.

So the man who built this space built it backward. He makes a place people want to be in before they have any reason to be, and then he goes and gives them the reason. Sounds out of the box and maybe a little risky, but let me tell you - it is working.

I know it works because I brought my youngest son to help me lay out the mural. He looked around and already told me he wants to work here. He does not even have a job (or a diploma yet). He is fourteen, and he wants in.

When a kid with no reason to belong somewhere walks in and wants to, the room is doing its job.

The invitation on the wall

My part is on the wall itself. I am painting the company's whole history across it, about fifty little scenes in a comic-strip style, from the first handful of founders to the hundreds of people who work here now.

Somewhere in the middle there is a line about what it means to be here, and what it means to do this kind of work.

The mural is the story of the place, put somewhere people can walk right up to it and find themselves in it. That is the point of the whole thing, to invite people in.

There is something full circle about it for me. I used to sit in rooms like the ones this company does its hardest work in. Now I am the one on the ladder, making the place worth walking into.

Back then I could not have told you what was missing. I have spent all week looking at it on this wall.

Whatever place you are responsible for, an office, a camp, a single room, it is worth asking the same thing. When someone walks in for the first time, do they want to stay?

Grateful you are here,

Wade