The Jelly Belly Dispenser

I spent $60 a week on Jelly Bellies in the basement of the Pentagon.

They gave people a reason to stop by my desk.

Yes, the Pentagon basement is real, and calling it the “bowels of the building” is not too far from the truth. Special badges get you down there, which is warning enough. Once there, you enter a windowless, soul-sucking place with the air-conditioned scent of hard work.

Our joint team communicated and refined strategy and policy options for senior national leaders. Occasionally we'd get a kitchen pass and go “upstairs” to see the reflected daylight of the E Ring or cut through the courtyard to check the weather.

My boss at the time, then-BG Scott Miller, had recently directed the team to reconfigure our workspace. He understood that physical space affects how people work and deliberately shaped the environment around what the organization needed to accomplish. He treated space as a leadership tool.

This wasn't a Google-style beanbag-and-fro-yo redesign. We pulled down the insanely demoralizing cubicle farms and created roughly a football field's worth of open workspace. Computer monitors for all the types of systems had to remain below “name-tape defilade.”

You had to be able to look over your monitor and see other people. No hiding. No walls of personal flair.

I learned from GEN Miller's approach and made one slight adjustment of my own.

I needed to quickly understand our people and what the team was accomplishing. Thanks to my wife's trips to Wegman's—and my pursuit of the perfect Jelly Belly flavor combinations—I developed a technique.

Maybe just a little above name-tape defilade (sorry, boss) I placed a Jelly Belly dispenser on my desk.

People wandered over, sampled the combination of the week, and talked—sometimes about work, sometimes about a problem, sometimes about what they hoped to do with their families if they ever escaped the gravitational pull of the Pentagon basement.

I learned, and I learned fast.

Those informal conversations helped me understand where talent existed, who needed information someone else possessed, and how our work fit together.

The work was hard, and nearly pure sugar, combined with strong coffee, certainly helped.

I took the practice with me. The picture is a smaller bowl that later sat on my desk at Fort Drum as a Brigade Combat Team Commander. There are no pictures of the original; cameras weren't allowed downstairs, and neither were our flip phones—yes, it was a while ago.

Fewer people just wandered into the brigade commander's office, but my staff and subordinate commanders knew the Jelly Bellies were available. The combination of Root Beer, Dr Pepper, Cherry Cola, and Cream Soda usually got the highest marks.

We rightly design organizations around formal ways of exchanging information—meetings, reports, briefings, email, organizational charts.

And, some of what I most needed to know came from people standing at my desk eating Jelly Bellies.