Yvon Chouinard showed us a new way of life .
What Mr. Yamaguchi and the Trailheads hope to achieve with HINOKO TOKYO is very clear.
. "I wanted to mix working and outdoor activities within an hour and a half of central Tokyo. I have a hypothesis that in order to live a good life, it is important to have the three elements of working, living, and playing seamlessly connected, and this is one of my experiments. This was one of the experiments I was conducting.
He came up with the answer around 2008, long before there were calls for reforms in the way people work. Mr. Yamaguchi himself was struggling with his own work style at the time.
. "At the time, I was in my third year of working and was feeling bewildered about working. . When I was in college, I was into music, and I used to listen to everything from rock to hardcore and, at its most earthy, roots-rock reggae. . I also loved the outdoors from that time on, so I would go camping and touring on my mountain bike. . Then I suddenly became a working adult, and the gap between the situation and wearing a suit and tie was too big. I kept thinking, 'Oh, is this what it means to work?
. Then, an encounter with that legendary book brought about a change in his way of thinking.
I read a book by Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, titled "Let Your Employees Go Surfing," and it was an eye-opener. . I read that Patagonia has a rule that if the weather permits, employees are allowed to take time off from work to go outdoors. I realized that it is possible to have an organization that values not only work, but also the outdoors, time with family and friends, and one's own life.
At the time, Mr. Yamaguchi was working in the real estate industry. As a result of this realization, he switched to an office design company and began to explore new ways of working and the office as never before. In order to pursue the ideal way of working, it is a shortcut to create one's own ideal organization. He also realized that he would be able to work more freely and energetically if he could work in a team without being tied down, so he launched "Trailheads," an office production company.
The "Trailheads" led by Mr. Yamaguchi, who says, "It is not enough to have a desk and a chair; an office also needs a free space that is not just for working," has an image of an office suitable for the future.
As an indication of this, we have produced a number of office spaces for startup companies that are new in both philosophy and organizational structure. All of them are designed in a way that is different from the conventional office image and optimized for the people who work there, which is pervasive at Trailheads. The design is not based on a set idea of what an office should look like, but rather on an attitude of drawing out the unique qualities of the people who work there and of the company itself. The people with whom we work in the process of creating an office are also diverse. The idea of seamlessly connecting working, living, and playing, in other words, may be a kind of custom-made work. This, too, seems to be a characteristic of Trailheads, which, like the "co-creation" of "yasugi" production, is created through communication and collaboration with others.
