a revolution in fabrics can keep you cooler in the dog days of summer and warmer as fall approaches. good-bye cubicles, the return of the 1950s office bull pen. we'll talk to an office design expert. and reculturing. how corporate culture is changing post-pandemic. that's this week on "press: here". welcome, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. a lot is happening in the world of materials. cloth and clothing. the winter jacket that you wear now is much thinner but warmer

than the one you wore as a kid and breathable moisture-wicking golf shirts are much cooler than shirts of the past. but one stanford scientist is working on even the next step in both warm and cool clothes. dr. yi cui is an energy scientist, professor, director of stanford's advanced materials laboratory. the company he launched, life labs, is selling his clothing in the future right now. dr. cui joins me now. welcome to you. i understand you came up with this idea of improving clothing when you were actually working on how to save energy on heating and cooling. i mean, you don't have to air-condition as much, if people are wearing more cooling clothing. >> yeah, that is correct. and it dates back to six, seven years ago. we invented a new type of cooling clothing and warming clothing, as well. so if we have much better

cooling clothing, you're not air-conditioning as much, you can save up to 20% or 30% of the energy depending on the weather conditions. so that was the starting point. >> what's happening in your cooling clothing. you're talking about, perhaps, a feeling of a three-degree difference, which is a lot. >> yeah, if you look at the human body temperature is 37 degrees celsius, roughly. so that's a 98.6 fahrenheit. so at a temperature, our bodies constantly radiate out the mid-wavelength, infrared radiation for infrared. so a cooling textile is transparent to the mid-infrared, allow the body heat to go out without blocking it. and really allows you to release

the heat very fast. it has about three degrees celsius cooling power to your body. that's really, really high. so, what i'm wearing today myself is our own cooling polo shirt product, at home. it's just really cool. >> now, i'm guessing your warming clothing does exactly the opposite. it traps infrared radiation. >> yes, our warming one is doing the opposite. trapping infrared without giving it out, so you can keep your body without losing heat. >> i've seen the machine that generates this thread that you're making. i'm kind of reminded of a spinning wheel. what is the actual material? the type of plastic that's being made. >> so for the cooling ones, in order to make it transparent, the mid-infrared, we are using a

polyethylene. this is a commonly available polymer, available in a million ton scale. >> right, and because, i think, people think of, you know, cotton as being somehow environmentally safe -- not safe, but renewable, et cetera. but the amount of energy that goes into growing and then spinning and then transporting cotton is tremendous. >> yeah, cotton is considered naturally available product, so it feels good. however, you're exactly right, cotton requires to grow cotton, you need fertilizer, you need water. and then you take the cotton and make it into textile and it's going through this dyeing process, like making the different colors, requires water, you need to -- it's environmentally polluted, you need to treat the water. its environmental footprint is much higher. footprint higher means it impacts the environment a lot more than polyethylene.

it's indeed a challenging product, for cotton to be considered sustainable. >> i said off the top that you're a stanford scientist and also, you have this company, where you're selling this clothing. and i've looked at the website. it looks a lot like lululemon, right? you've got tops and shorts and jackets. what's your distribution plan beyond that? are you in stores? are you trying to get into stores or make a deal with a company like nike? >> so, we do have amazing products through life labs design. this is the company that i help cofounded. we just have been in the market for six months also, roughly, and lastly, customers see how our product look like, and it has been fantastic. we do want to further expand in

the commercial space, just at the beginning. so, not pricier to compare with lululemon yet. >> what's the reaction that people get? anytime you feel up with something that you feel is revolutionary, in the sense that you say, you know, it's 3 degrees cooler on the summer wear, you need somebody to try it in order to convince them. but i'm guessing people give you an immediate feedback that, oh, wait, this does work. >> oh, yeah. as soon as they touch it. touch it, feel it, they say, this is amazing. and the response is, it's all right there. it's just incredible. so imagination, you don't know what it's like, not until you touch it. when you touch it, you are going to like it. >> dr. cui, i appreciate you being with us. a stanford scientist working on

the future of materials. it's pretty cool and warm stuff. and "press: here" will be back in just a minute.

welcome back to "press: here." twitter is stuck with sort of a strange problem. very few people who work at twitter want elon musk to run the place, but they'd also benefit financially from forcing

musk to keep his promise and buy twitter for far more than it's really worth. it's a badly thought out business deal, mostly with bad options. melissa daimler was one of the key developers of twitter's organization. she's an expert on corporate culture. she just wrote a book called "reculturing," and i thought i would bring her on to talk about twitter and corporate culture in general. if musk is forced to buy twitter, what sort of corporate culture is he going to run into at that company? >> you never know with musk. i was at twitter in the glory days, between 2012 and 2016, prior to it even going public. at that time, we were very strong in terms of having a clear strategy and making sure that our culture aligned with thatr that.

i think musk is a wild card, as we all know. and i hope that if he does end up taking over the company, that he keeps a lot of the huge foundational components of what twitter has built, both strategically and culturally. >> i suppose it would help us define what culture is. it feels like what the employees do when the boss is not around. >> that is not how i define culture. i think there's been a lot of definitions out there. culture as a concept has been around for over 70 years, which i did not realize. but we've had a hard time defining it. i heard, it's the organization's personality. it's what makes people happy and motivates people. i think that we can design and operationalize culture in a way that gives us all an opportunity to contribute to that.

so i believe that it is three things. it goes beyond values. it's our behaviors, how we work with each other. it's integrating those behaviors into some of those core people processes that we have, so how we interview, how we onboard, how we give feedback, and it's also just our daily practices. you know, how we have meetings, how we connect like this. >> and this is still important, even though that many people are working at home. you're still affected by a company culture. >> i think that is the big aha that a lot of people have had in the last couple of years. that we connected and even conflated culture with ping-pong tables and doughnuts and free food and perks. and while all of that is great, i love a good free sandwich, that is not culture. so, you know, while we've been at home these last couple of years, we still have done culture.

i think culture is a more active word. i say it's a verb. and so, you know, when we think about culture and we're all working from home, that's where i think the behaviors and how we work together shows up, even more than, you know, being in an office. >> so, if you have a good company culture, you know, if somebody shows up who is, who is not a good cultural fit, who goes against the grain of what it is, you know, maybe your company has been around 20 years, 20 years of, this is the way we've done it and we like it this way, that person tends to then move on. you can get rid of a cancerous person, a person who's cancerous to your culture. but what can derail culture? what is company cultures? and i'm talking about a positive company culture here, what is its biggest enemy? >> i think the biggest enemy of culture is relegating it to hr,

as a one-off initiative. and not being able to see it as a strategic lever to help drive your business. >> so that was good culture. let's talk about bad culture. you were at we work for a while. you seem to understand almost right away, you couldn't fix the cultural -- corporate culture there. >> yeah, one of the things i talk about in the book is this idea of looking at an organization and culture as a system, you know, so there's so many different parts, as we know. so when we're shifting our strategy, there's an opportunity to also look at our culture and our behaviors. and i think there's been a lot of good stories. there's the hlu docuseries, wework, all of it pointed to adam neumann as a ceo. and while he definitely had its faults, i think it's more about the cracks in the system at wework. so you not only had adam as the

ceo, but you had a very junior leadership team that wasn't diverse, they didn't have a lot of diverse thinking that was brought to the table. >> in your book, you mentioned two of my favorite people, chip connelly and patti mccord. chip created the hotel chain and patti ran hr at netflix. she invented hr at netflix. what have you learned from them? >> i just have so much respect for both of them. >> me too. >> and side note, i think they're both just fun to be around. and patti,wy interviewed her for the book, we just -- i had a pain in my side because i was laughing so much. but, you know, netflix, she spearheaded that whole culture deck, which a lot of us are familiar with now, especially in silicon valley. and i think she inspired me to think beyond the values and go to more of that behavioral

concept. so netflix, over ten years ago, identified, what are those kind of 15 to 20 core behaviors that we expect from everybody in the organization is our playbook? and then embedded those into their hiring process and how they give feedback. i have a lot of respect, and i think what i also appreciate abis, you know, she is provocative. you know, she kind of pokes at the typical components that we think about, when we think about hr. she believes that hr has a very big role to play and a strategic place at the table and she did just that at netflix. i think chip is, you know, he was reculturing before i defined it as reculturing. and in every company, even what he's doing now, he has this amazing retreat center in baja, mexico, and he continues to not just be a good thought leader,

like when he was when he ran the hotel chain, but he is always looking at how best to bring people along. how to strengthen a culture and i just, i appreciated my time with chip and he's always -- i ended the book with a question that he often asks people. and he's asked people his entire career, how can i help you do your best work. and i think ultimately, that's what he with all want. that's what we're trying to strive for, when we think about culture. >> well, any friend of chip and patti is a friend of mine. melissa daimler, thank you for being with us this morning. melissa is currently chief learning officer at newtome. in the past, she's helped many with their culture. her new book is "reculturing: design your company's cultur to connect with strategy and purpose for a lasting success." up next on "press: here,"

we'll continue our look at life inside the office with a m majo manufactcturer of o office fufurniture. "press: hehere" will b be right back.

welcome back to "press: here." if you're just joining us, we were talking about company culture just before the break. now, i want to bring in jonathan webb. he is an executive at the office furniture company ki, which outfits work spaces for companies like disney and amazon

and microsoft. jonathan's team recently surveyed 400 architects, designers, and businesses to figure out what they were hoping to do with offices, now that at least some people were coming back to work. good morning, jonathan. what'd you find? what's the post-pandemic office going to look like? >> well, it's going to be different, that's for sure. i think when we talk about amenities and we talk about extras, i don't think we're talking about things like ping-pong tables and other things like that that bring people back to the office. the advent of work has taken over. employers are redefining the value of proposition of the office. focused work with occur anywhere. we've all learned working from home during the pandemic so office extras are now focused on

providing environments that promote really three very specific things. so the first are collaborative environments, and i can't overstate this strongly enough. organizations and employers, both recognize the importance of face-to-face engagement. we're seeing an increase in the number of spaces specifically designed for ideation and group interaction in the offices. and that old one-to-one ratio, if you remember, every time we hired an fte, we gave them one workstation. that old ratio of one-to-one is really being reduced to accommodate those new spaces. >> you're talking about not everyone having their own desk as a full-time employee, but hoteling or how would you handle -- i think when i work in with my little plant and pencil sharpener, i don't get a desk? >> you might not. it depends on the organization and the amount of real estate that they have. because the focus on getting people back to the office is

about creating engagement, it's about getting people back together in person to work and to collaborate. that might mean less personal space. and that might mean you have freedom of choice. you can choose to do work at home, like some of us do, one, two more days a week. but when you come back to the office, it might feel a little bit more free address. it might feel like you still have a choice, but might not necessarily have the choice to go to your own personally owned workstation. >> these days, if you have a corporate laptop, that is your office. you know, you brought it from home and then you find a small conference room or a workstation or somewhere else, and you're back. goodness knows you don't have an office phone. that's your cell phone in your pocket. >> absolutely. and that's that second extra that we talk about now in the office is, you know, back in 2020, we all become video conferencing experts overnight. we all learned how to do it on laptop or a desktop, but

organizations overall were probably not equipped to be able to accommodate video conferencing when we have a certain percentage of people in the office and a certain percentage of people at home. the types of amenities now are largely technology-based. they're really based on the idea that we want to welcome people back to the office that are coming back to the office, want to come back to the office, but we still need to make room in our effort meetings for those of us that are spending a day or two or more at home, and we need to be able to do that in a very meaningful way create environments that allow us to easily video conference with each other and still be in person with each other. >> we have cubicles in our newsroom and even more cubicles in the sense that they put plexiglas up to the ceiling on them. but cubicles are falling out of fashion. nothing is new under the sun. we're going back to the long tables, which they would have called in the '50s, they would have called that the bull pen.

>> yeah, the open plan environment. we went back four to five years ago to open plan, get rid of all of the cubicles, overnight, the great plexiglas shortage of 2020, where everyone needed plexiglas. you couldn't find it anywhere. it was amazing. i think we're starting to see the plexiglas come down, that's amazing, but we are starting to see a lot more flexibility and creativity in environments, especially when we're talking about environments for groups to engage, work together while they're in the office. >> and some companies are doing some sort of lifestyle spending account. you know, i don't know what you device want, but here's money. and if your perk is gyms and your perk is doing something else, figure it out yourself. >> and the that last point i was

going to make, that third extra is a more comprehensive strategy to address organizational well-being. so i would say before the pandemic, we talked a lot about wellness programs and what we did was try to promote environments that promoted inherent workplaces, whether it was a sit/stand up or different types of environment that encourage people to get up and move around to a variety of work environments, promoting outdoor spaces, we still have all of that, but now the shift has really focused from wellness to well-being. there's a mental health component. one of the shifts you'll start to see, the wellness programs won't go away, but we're already starting to see an increase in the number of programs that support overall well-being,

mental health well-being, as well. >> it's interesting for a furniture manufacturer to be saying that, but you're absolutely right. you work in an office designing offices. what's your least favorite part of your own office or your own office building. >> i would say the least favorable thing about our office building is it's kind of old. our office building was back in the 1970s, but we are announcing plans that we're starting brand-new headquarters at ki, something we've been looking forward to doing in the future and i'm hoping in the next few years, we'll be able to break down on new ki headquarters. we're not unlike any organization. we understand that it takes time and resources and money to build out spaces, to do architecture, even to buy furniture.

you better be able to answer the question, why is this important for the organization? for us, it's about retracting and attaining talent. that's always been our number one priority, especially younger talent. i don't think everybody gets comes out of college thinking that they want to work in the office furniture industry, but we want to make sure we're presenting the most possible environment and the most flexible workplace possible. that's a priority for us at ki. >> lastly, what are the next generation of office workers asking for? what's their highest priority? >> flexibility. at the end of the day, these are individuals that have spent the last four to six years of their lives in what i would call the ultimate flexible environment.

it's funny that it took until 2020 for so many individuals to work from home and have this ability to work anywhere. but think about a college student, college students do work everywhere. their favorite working spot might be the cafeteria or the library or the park bench or somewhere outside. they're the origin distributive workforce. they want to carry those work stiles into corporate life. they want to have the flexibility to work where they want and how they want and they want to be productive in doing so. i think you'll start to see a lot of companies that are going to look to collegiate design as a drive-up corporate design. they'll say, this is how my next generation of worker likes to work. we should maybe try to emulate some of those environments. we're already starting to see some of that. >> jonathan webb is an executive

at the office furniture manufacturer, ki. appreciate you being with us this morning. and "press: here" will be back in just a minute.

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damian trujillo: hello, and welcome to "comunidad del valle." i'm damian trujillo, and today, we go one-on-one with a senior adviser to the president of the united states, who also happens to be the granddaughter of cesar chavez, on your "comunidad del valle." ♪♪♪ damian: julie chavez rodriguez, thank you for joining us today. you know, i drive my pickup truck to work every day, and i do my job, and i go home, and that's humbling. you drive to work every day, and you come to the white house. are you as awestruck now about that fact as you were on the first day, or what's your thought process when you come to work?