The Funeral or the Lab

Two articles landed in the Wall Street Journal within days of each other last week, and reading them back-to-back tells a deeper story.

The first chronicles what its headline calls the joylessness of American work. Perks disappearing, espresso machines going dark, AI anxiety saturating every conversation. Gallup data shows manager spans have jumped nearly 50% since 2013, with the average manager now overseeing roughly 12 direct reports. CFOs mentioned “efficiency” on 307 earnings calls last quarter — up from 219 a year earlier, per AlphaSense. One tech employee described the current mood as a funeral. Another said he’s retired from corporate life entirely.

The second, written by Jon Gertner (author of The Idea Factory), revisits Bell Labs, the research organization that produced transistors, cellular networks, satellites, solar power, UNIX, and the C programming language across a golden age spanning the late 1920s through the 1980s. Gertner’s question is the one that matters: was Bell Labs just lucky, or did its leaders understand something replicable about how innovation actually works?

The answer, based on Gertner’s reporting, is both. Bell Labs had enormous situational advantages — monopoly-backed funding, a problem-rich environment, military contracts that pushed materials science forward. By the 1980s it employed about 25,000 people on a budget equivalent to roughly $7 billion in today’s dollars.

But situational advantage alone doesn’t produce five decades of breakthroughs. What turned luck into sustained performance was a set of deliberate leadership choices, most of them traceable to Mervin Kelly, who rose from young manager to Labs president. During the Great Depression, when most organizations were contracting, Kelly recruited physicists and material scientists — including William Shockley, who would later co-invent the transistor. He invested in people precisely when conventional wisdom said to cut.

Kelly also designed the Murray Hill campus so that departments were spread apart, forcing scientists and engineers to walk, encounter colleagues from other disciplines, and engage in unplanned conversation. He composed teams for productive friction — mixing physicists with chemists, electrical engineers with metallurgists — because he’d learned during the war effort that complex problems demanded diverse expertise working in close proximity. Most importantly, researchers at Bell Labs knew their ideas would be implemented into the system AT&T was actually running. They could see how their work connected to real consequences.

A pattern emerges when these two articles are read together. The conditions that made Bell Labs extraordinary are almost perfectly inverted in the workplaces described in the first.

Thanks for reading Lead from the Front! This post is public, feel free to share the knowledge.

Bell Labs gave people time. The cellular network concept emerged in the late 1940s and wasn’t tested at scale until the late 1970s. Our contemporary workplaces are compressing every timeline, demanding AI-augmented productivity gains measured in quarters, not decades.

The contrast runs deeper than timelines. Kelly built cross-disciplinary connections into the physical architecture of work. We’re moving in the opposite direction, expanding manager spans to the point where meaningful one-on-one relationships become mathematically impossible. Twelve direct reports leave approximately 20 minutes per person per week for genuine developmental conversation. And where Bell Labs researchers could see how their ideas connected to the system AT&T was running, today’s employees describe feeling like interchangeable inputs in an efficiency equation.

The Joyless article captures a real and widespread mood. But it stays at the symptom level, in espresso machines and wine bottle caps. The deeper problem is structural. When our organizations strip away every signal that communicates investment in people, they’re dismantling the relationship infrastructure that enables innovation, retention, and sustained performance.

Kelly understood something we keep rediscovering: innovation comes from people who are connected to each other across disciplinary boundaries, connected to problems worth solving, and given enough time and trust to work through difficulty. None of that is free. All of it requires leaders who are willing to invest counter-cyclically — to build capability when the pressure says cut.

The question facing our executives isn’t whether they can afford Bell Labs-scale R&D budgets. They can’t. The question is whether they’re making the same category of leadership choice Kelly made, investing in human connection and capability development even when the quarterly math argues against it, or whether they’re optimizing for efficiency in ways that quietly destroy the conditions their organizations need to adapt and innovate. The gap between strategy and execution has always lived in these choices.

One path built technologies we still depend on a century later. The other one is producing a workforce that describes its office as a funeral.

Responding to “How Working in America Became So Joyless” (WSJ, March 30, 2026) and Jon Gertner’s “What the Legendary Bell Labs Can Teach Us About Innovation” (WSJ, 2026).