Strolling meetings: the power move of tech gods and Roman senators
Walk with me, plebe
Long walks seem to have always been a favored pastime of important men. There’s nothing like conducting a consequential meeting during a vigorous stroll to project both physical and professional strength, forcing colleagues and competitors to keep up. “Walk with me” is a uniquely perambulatory powerplay.
Steve Jobs famously preferred to take his meetings on long walks around Silicon Valley. In 2010, he had one such outing with Mark Zuckerberg in Palo Alto to discuss a potential collaboration. Since then, Zuckerberg and dozens of other Jobs acolytes have adopted the “pedaconference,” as the walk-and-talk was coined on The West Wing.
Multiple potential employees told The New York Times in 2011 that Zuckerberg likes to take promising new hires for a stroll around Facebook headquarters, leading them up to a vista overlooking the offices of various tech giants. There, like an Italian prince surveying competing city-states, he points out the various campuses laid out before him and tells his companion that Facebook will outpace them all.
Presidents, too, have been known for taking walks. Obama walked for 45 minutes before announcing his decision not to strike against Syria last year, and usually takes a walk with his chief of staff at the end of the day in Washington, according to Bloomberg. Harry Truman’s daily routine included a 5 am wake up call and a two-hour walk around the White House, proceeding at the Army’s 120-steps-per-minute pace. Coolidge, McKinley, and Harrison were also known to go out for a spin. Lyndon Baines Johnson took pedaconferencing to the extreme, forcing aides to follow him into the bathroom so they could continue their mobile conversations.
The well-publicized penchant for walks among America’s political and commercial giants has lately been interpreted as novel approach to incorporating work into an active lifestyle. But it’s also an ancient way of projecting power and class, a public display of wealth and intelligence dating back to antiquity.
As Timothy O’Sullivan writes in his study of walking in Roman culture, the ambulatio, or leisurely walk, was a critical part of the upper class Roman lifestyle. According to Cicero’s descriptions in his philosophical dialogues, these walks took place among men within the confines of the Roman villa. “The Roman ambulatio flaunted the economic independence of the walker, who did not need to use his body to earn a wage, and could instead walk back and forth with no particular destination… the Roman ambulatio was therefore a social and even an intellectual activity, a setting for conversation among equals,” O’Sullivan writes. “The villa and the ambulatio both participated in a culture of conspicuous consumption. The elite villa advertised the wealth of the owner by the devotion of (notionally) productive space to non-commercial leisure practices.” It also provided a forum for current and future leaders to parade their fitness for political office. “Elite males were expected to advertise their self-control in their very bodies — for if they could not control their bodies, how could they manage to control the state?”
O’Sullivan’s description of ancient Roman villas bears more than a little resemblance to the sprawling campuses of Silicon Valley, notable for their often extravagant emphasis on recreation and leisure time. Pristine lawns, free yoga classes, and conference bikes are the norm at Google, which set the industry standard when it comes to atmospheric indulgences and the accompanying employee perks.
In Wanderlust, an epic history of walking, Rebecca Solnit describes how the Roman ambulatio was later taken up by European nobility, first for health, later for leisure. “Most English estates consisted of a series of increasingly controlled spaces: the park, the garden, and the house. Originally hunting preserves, parks remained as a kind of buffer zone between the leisure classes and the agricultural land and workers around them,” she writes. The upper class made a public performance of walking on private land, much like Jobs and Zuckerberg ambling about the corporate campuses of Silicon Valley, and like Obama, LBJ, and Truman around the White House. It’s no coincidence that whenever Obama passes through the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania for a surprise walk around the National Mall, his short outing becomes an event of national attention.
Even public gardens and parks originated as playgrounds for the upper strata of society to parade their wealth, especially in cities. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Solnit writes, “idyllic spaces had been created for the urban rich — tree-lined promenades, semi-public gardens and parks…Though politics, flirtations, and commerce might be conducted in them, they were little more than outdoor salons and ballrooms.” Central Park was dominated by wealthy carriages and high fashion, while the city’s poor paid to enter private parks where they could socialize more freely.
Now that America’s parks are playgrounds for all “walks of life” (for the most part), the gods of Silicon Valley appear to have set about recreating environments akin to the private Roman villas and English gardens these works describe: 43 acres here, 700 acres there. Within their gated confines, men — and it is overwhelmingly men — may once again stroll only with those they deem their intellectual and societal equals.
