Facilities, Culture, and Leadership: Lessons from Pitney Bowes

Before becoming CEO of Pitney Bowes, I had spent years studying land-use planning and serving on boards and task forces that taught me how profoundly the design and location of facilities shape culture and behavior. That appreciation was also deeply personal, rooted in formative experiences growing up.

One early lesson came from my Catholic parish in Rochester, New York. The church burned down in 1962, when I was in eighth grade. When rebuilt, it reflected the seismic changes of the Second Vatican Council: the altar was repositioned so that the priest faced the congregation, not the other way around. The redesign, one among many, transformed the tone of worship, changing the relationship between priest and parishioners in our parish. Many other Catholic Churches built during that period used brighter materials and colors, more natural light, and much more comfortable seating areas.

I realized even then that simple shifts in layout, materials and colors could reshape human interaction. That insight stayed with me throughout my life.

Lessons from the Old Headquarters

When I joined Pitney Bowes Legal Department in 1979, its headquarters was attached to the main factory, a sprawling, aging facility first opened in 1920 and built out over many decades. It was ugly, drafty, and uncomfortable. During President Carter’s energy conservation initiative, our CEO Fred Allen ordered thermostats set to 78 degrees in summer and 65 in winter. In practice, our legal offices routinely hit 85 degrees in July and dropped close to 60 in January. On cold winter mornings, we huddled near the heat generated by the word processors, or opened rattling windows for relief on summer afternoons.

Yet the building had virtues. Its compact, utilitarian layout forced interaction. The legal department’s U-shaped cluster of offices and shared admin space created constant collaboration. Attorneys dropped in on each other, shared daily lunches, and mingled easily with colleagues in the cafeteria, company store, or clinic. Executives had reasonably big, but relatively modest, offices, parked in the same lot as everyone else, and used the same stairways and hallways. Hierarchy existed, but it was muted. In many ways, the space reinforced a sense of community.

The Grand Experiment: A World Headquarters

In 1981, Fred Allen commissioned world-renowned architect I.M. Pei to design a gleaming new world headquarters: 423,000 square feet for 1,200 employees, with soaring ceilings, marble floors, and 14 different office sizes based on job rank. Completed in 1986, it was meant to consolidate scattered facilities, attract talent, and serve as a civic anchor for Stamford's South End redevelopment.

At first, we were thrilled. The building was modern, clean, and impressive—an immediate recruiting asset. Candidates who would have balked at joining us in the old factory offices eagerly accepted offers once they saw the new headquarters. For the City, it stood as a symbol of permanence and prestige. We hosted many memorable and moving community events there, including one of my favorites, the annual holiday Tree of Life Ceremony that invited community members to remember loved ones they had lost that year.

But very quickly, its unintended cultural consequences also became clear. Interaction plummeted. Attorneys, like others who used to work closely together in the old building, no longer dropped by one another’s offices. Lunches together became rare. Assistants, once clustered, were now walled off from their peers. Executives retreated to private offices with bathrooms, conference tables, and even security barriers. A separate executive parking garage (cynically referred to as "the Bat Cave") reinforced distance from the rest of the workforce.

Hierarchy hardened. Fourteen different office sizes stoked resentment and made titles that determined office assignments more coveted than responsibilities. Interdepartmental collaboration weakened, as larger, more insulated spaces encouraged siloed thinking. Small irritations—fruit baskets and flowers in executive suites, personalized décor, or excessive art spending—fed resentment of executives by front-line employees. The locations of elevators and stairways reduced incidental encounters. The building was elegant, but isolating.

By the time I became CEO in 1996, the World Headquarters was a mixed blessing. Our Facilities and Community Affairs leaders did a phenomenal job realizing Fred Allen's vision of the building as a great community asset. But it also had become both a symbol and a driver of cultural drift among the employees working in it. The cohesiveness that had existed in the old, imperfect building had evaporated.

Efforts to Rebalance Culture

One of my early priorities as CEO was to reverse the World Headquarters' negative cultural effects. I focused on several principles:

• Reduce hierarchy. We cut office variations from 14 sizes to three and installed glass walls in the outer offices to bring natural light into interior spaces. This reduced status anxiety and encouraged openness.
• Foster interaction. We eliminated most dedicated office printers and conference tables, encouraging employees to use common areas. We expanded cafeteria space while shrinking formal dining rooms, to draw people into shared settings. I set an example by eating meals in the cafeteria with random groups of employees rather than in private.
• Limit indulgence. I discouraged executives from using company funds for extravagant outside restaurant meals when excellent in-house facilities existed. This was about more than cost control; it was about creating a culture of discipline and fairness.
• Reallocate space. We increased the number of large conference rooms, reducing the need for outside rentals and encouraging larger cross-functional gatherings within our walls.

In my own office suite, I virtually stopped using the massive, opulent “living room” with fireplace and balcony adjacent to my main office. In my main business office, I met visitors at my conference table rather than behind a forbidding desk, and I opened the "living room" space for others to use.

We also consolidated facilities across the company, eliminating unnecessary offices, reducing our real estate footprint, and pressing sales and service teams to spend more time with customers rather than at their desks.

The White Elephant Problem

Despite these efforts, the building itself remained a barrier to deeper culture change. I believe strongly that companies should rarely own headquarters or other buildings. Office layouts are not just architectural choices; they are cultural commitments that can lock organizations into patterns long after leadership changes. Factories and R&D labs can justify ownership in many instances, but office towers too often become “white elephants”—expensive to maintain, misaligned with evolving needs, and resistant to redesign.

I tried twice, once early in my tenure, and once again in 2005 when we were selling our main factory campus after closing it down in 2004, to persuade the Board to sell the building and relocate 750–800 headquarters employees. I knew this would require strong, explicit Board support. Fred Allen’s unilateral decision to build the World Headquarters in 1981 without that support had helped end his tenure prematurely. I was determined not to repeat that mistake.

But resistance was fierce. The World Headquarters building had cost $120 million to construct, and its book value in the mid-2000s was still $70 million. The best market offer we received in 2005 was $52 million, an $18 million loss on paper. My treasurer argued that surrounding redevelopment would eventually boost the value of the entire South End. She believed this South End redevelopment would also lift the value of the World Headquarters. She was half right: South End values doubled in five years, but when one of my successors finally sold the headquarters in 2013, it fetched only $40 million. It was, as the saying goes, a classic white elephant: costly, impressive, but of little practical value.

In the end, I decided not to force the issue. I had already undertaken multiple major cultural battles—suing the U.S. Postal Service over predatory practices, resisting overreaction to Internet postage, and divesting our external finance business. Each required years of Board dialogue and political capital. Selling the headquarters, though deeply aligned with my philosophy, would have been one battle too many.

Lessons Learned

Looking back, I regret not advocating more strongly for the sale. Facilities matter enormously. Layout, design, and ownership are not neutral decisions; they shape behavior, hierarchy, and culture more profoundly than most leaders recognize. They influence how people eat, meet, move, and even how they think about their status in an organization. They can either reinforce community or fracture it.

For Pitney Bowes, the old, humble, uncomfortable factory headquarters ironically fostered more cohesion than the grand, I.M. Pei–designed World Headquarters. The lesson is sobering: elegance and prestige can be cultural liabilities if they isolate rather than connect.

The firm that purchased the World Headquarters in 2013, Building and Land Technology, very shrewd real estate developers, retained most of the renovations done during my tenure and attempted a number of uses to make the building a viable multi-use facility.

Finally, in 2023, it received approval from the City of Stamford Zoning Board to convert the building into 256 apartments. In one sense, Fred Allen's legacy to have Pitney Bowes be a catalyst for a revitalized South End by building a 423,000 square foot facility was realized. But it happened in a very different way from what he envisioned.

Leaders must view facilities not as monuments, but as instruments—tools to reinforce the culture they aspire to create. Ownership should be rare, flexibility prized, and layout decisions made with the same rigor as strategic choices about markets and capital allocation. Otherwise, leaders risk locking future generations into costly, rigid environments that constrain rather than enable their success.