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Tim is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Aéto and exited Founder and CEO of Leesman - the world…
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Tim Oldman shared thisWe’re a tough bunch to please at Aéto. So a ‘credit where credit is due’ post. When almost all our work is helping some of the world’s most forward looking organisations do things better, Aéto folk are pre-programmed to look at things 🤔 differently. To look for hidden friction, for possible marginal gains, for micro moments that matter, for ways of being better at what they are likely already pretty awesome at. That makes it a tough gig choosing somewhere to go out as a team. Because within seconds we’re (some more than others 🫣) forensically dissecting the legibility of the font on the menu, the placing of the tables, the hospitality, lighting, air quality, play list, cutlery, chair ergonomics, acoustics, views, surface finishes 😖 But if you are even a bit like us, head where we did last week to celebrate our second birthday, to the The Coal Office Restaurant at Coal Drops Yard in London. There are not enough characters available in a post to tell you everything that’s brilliant about how they do what they do, so book a table and just do as we did, let the awesome Maria choose dinner for you. Starting with the brioche loaf that’s as big as your head. And be wholly engrossed in those you are with. Exquisite food, a brilliant team, great location…. This is how you do hospitality on so many levels. 👏🏻 Thanks Amelia Saberwal, CPCC for the original recommendation 🫶🏻 Coal Office Restaurant 👏🏻👏🏻
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Tim Oldman shared thisQuick. AI is happening. Add more collaboration space. It's the one-stop-shop proven cure for all your workplace challenges. Ideally, make it open collaboration. Well that's what you might think scanning the most recent postings from rather too many workplace mavens. On what basis does this solve lethargic return to office numbers? Becuase apparently it will. On what evidence does open collaboration work for AI empowered teams? Becuase it did't work for most of them before. Collaboration space should have a health warning; 🤒 Because its additive for designers who hate designing open plan offices 🤕 Because open collaboration offers little of or no psychological safety for it's occupants 🙉 Because if open collaboration space is VC equipped, you will destroy the focus of anyone sat nearby when you dial in Bob from Boston and Lisa from London and put them on speaker 🤑 Because it's costing you space that will rarely be used in the way the visuals you signed off suggested Collaboration space is not the secret sauce. It is not the one-shot elixir. Certainly its part of an essential and complex system that should be programmed in a balanced way to support how employees perform in their roles at their best. And as AI rapidly takes away the mundane, ordinary and procedural, what's left isn't just collaboration. There's other things in the complex work system mix - and as unfashionable as it may sound, providing space where employees can individually focus effectively remains critical. Don't believe all the headlines. And shout if you'd like to understand what evidence-based organizations are doing.
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Tim Oldman shared thisYet another case study from the healthcare industry of the impact of noise reduction on positive patient outcomes. You can also read another case study in our collection of MOMENT essays at https://lnkd.in/e4afAGnATim Oldman shared this#Hospital wards can be noisy places, even at night - and this is affecting patient recovery times. In the UK, the Silent Hospital Pilot Project – a collaboration between the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust and DNV Imatis - is trying a different approach. It’s trialling a new system on an antenatal ward that replaces the bells patients ring to attract the attention of nurses or midwives with alerts that are sent directly to staff’s mobile phones. The results so far? Better rested newborns and mothers, faster recovery times, and more efficient patient care. The World Economic Forum’s Digital Healthcare Transformation initiative aims to accelerate public-private collaboration in digital health, AI, and data, by sharing insights, driving action and building regional innovation capacity. Learn more here: https://ow.ly/jXXY50ZBV9a
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Tim Oldman shared thisWhat an incredible opportunity with an insanely good team.Tim Oldman shared this270 Park is redefining what hospitality looks like inside a corporate headquarters. I am hiring one person to partner across all four functions: Lobby Reception, Employee Dining, the Conference Center, and the Client Center. The Amenity Services Program Manager builds the business cases behind our strategic decisions and projects. You will turn golden data, room utilization, point of sale, lobby metrics, and vendor KPIs, into the analysis that makes decision possible! I am looking for someone genuinely passionate about hospitality who is also analytical and strategic enough to build the case for it. That combination is rare. If it is you, the link is below.
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Tim Oldman reposted thisOne of the most important leadership hires we’ll make this year. As Zoku enters its next phase of growth, we’re looking for an exceptional Head of Marketing & E-commerce to help shape the future of one of hospitality’s most distinctive brands. This role will play a key part in how we grow our brand and commercial performance in the years ahead. You’ll lead a talented team, work across four international locations and have the opportunity to make a real commercial impact. If you know someone who’s ready for this challenge, I’d really appreciate it if you’d share this opportunity or make an introduction.Tim Oldman reposted thisAfter a truly wonderful 6+ years at Zoku, one of the coolest roles in hospitality marketing (not at all biased) is up for grabs.👇🏼 It's honestly been the best place to work. The brand is unparalleled, and it's been so lovely working alongside colleagues who love hospitality as much as I do. I joined Zoku when we were just one hotel, literally the day COVID shut everything down. Since then I'm truly grateful to have built up the marketing department we have today. After opening 3 new hotels, we now operate in 4 cities, and I'm proud of what we've accomplished. A huge thank you to everyone at Zoku, and especially to Hans Meyer and Marc Jongerius, for trusting me these past 6 years. It's been a genuine pleasure working for you both. With that said, the marketing team is expanding as we hire my replacement. We're hiring for three exciting roles: 1️⃣ Head of Marketing (my replacement) 2️⃣ E-commerce Lead 3️⃣ Social Media Content Creator If any of these sound like you, please apply directly. I'll be helping build an amazing team over the next 3 months, leaving Zoku in great hands (and with an even bigger team). So what’s next for me, you may be wondering…? I’ll be taking some time to travel, and then pursue my dream of starting a freelance career. More on that soon ✨
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Tim Oldman reposted thisTim Oldman reposted thisVEGA will be exhibiting at Pinewood Group Limited at this amazing event from Sustainable Film. A practical day for film and TV crews with masterclasses, new technology showcases and direct answers around cost and logistics. 📍 Pinewood Studios 📅 Thursday 9 July 2026 🕙 10am – 5pm Follow this link to book your place: https://buff.ly/Zmw7lL8
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Tim Oldman shared thisAgh enough moaning about the weather! 🫠 How about instead you take that unloved rooftop or the underused courtyard and start helping reduce the urban heat island effect that stifles city centres. And maybe support your employee mental health and your local school at the same time ���🏻♂️ Check the incredible work of MicroHabitat and Orlane Panet in Allison E.’s post below.Tim Oldman shared thisLike many other days in the UK, today's hot topic was the weather. We're normally complaining about the rain or lack of sun, but temperatures in some parts of the UK climbed to near 40 ºC today. The heat is particularly unbearable in the concrete jungles that are our urban centres, where buildings, roads, pavements, and transport come together to lock in and magnify the heat. Enter MicroHabitat, an organisation trying to change that by transforming underutilised spaces like vacant rooftops and terraces into urban farms. As part of our research for the second edition of Aéto's journal MOMENT, we spoke with Orlane Panet and Nicholas Gilroy from Microhabitat to understand more about how these farms can combat the urban heat island effect as well as build community, provide fresh produce for local food banks and help fight hunger. You can read more about their brilliant work via the link in the comments.
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Tim Oldman shared thisAnother monumental week for Aéto in NYC to kick off a review of JPMorganChase’s incredible 270 Park Avenue New York hq, now six months into operation. The multi modal research project is seeking to understand how 10,000+ colleagues and thousands of daily visiting staff experience one of the most advanced and superbly amenitized buildings in the world. If you’ve seen images of the cavernous entrance lobby, or the incredible exoskeleton structure that allows the quarter-mile tall all electric tower to straddle the train lines into Grand Central Station and wondered what it feels like to be based here or what sort of culture it promotes, we can say from our own experience this week that this is one of the warmest, welcoming group of people we have the huge privilege to be around. We have spoken personally with hundreds of JPMC colleagues as they go about their everyday business and every single one was enthusiastic to participate in the study, many wanting to chat for longer, willingly helping build a richer picture of their relationship with the building. As part of the project we also had acclaimed British artist Luke Adam Hawker with us to try and capture the relationship between people and place through his incredible ink pen drawings. He quickly became a talking point that gave our deeply analytic research project a softer side, especially when busy people realised they had been captured in his work, momentarily frozen in time in ink on paper. A few even lingered longer to try and make sure they made it in :) And I can genuinely say we made new friends, with people returning multiple times to check on progress, or when he changed locations, coming over to see how a new view across one of these immense volumes might possibly be captured. And then to top it all, a ‘pinch me’ moment as Lord Norman Foster, passing through the main entrance, made the time to chat. What a week. Easy to love what we do when we get to work with clients and partners like this. Special thanks to James Shea, Spencer Isaacs and Matthew J. Montañes and their brilliant teams.
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Tim Oldman posted this🏖️ In Germany a court has found in favour of a tourist seeking €900 in damages against a resort in Greece after he was unable to secure a pool sunlounger because other holidaymakers had already reserved them with a towel 😬😂. Apparently he spent 20 minutes each morning trying to find a lounger, despite waking up at 06:00 to race down at dawn 🏃🏼♂️➡️. The judge decided that the resort management had failed to enforce the resort's own ban on “towel reserving”, and were not adequately confronting guests who were engaging in these despicable and antisocial practices (the last few words were mine, not the judge’s). It is not clear whether the German claimant was most agreaved at not finding a lounger, or having been beaten in the towel race to reserve a lounger. The German judge seemed happy to apportion fault (actually to the tour operator who sold the resort holiday to the German tourist), but where really is the fault? - Not enough sunloungers? - Too many sunseekers? - The weather for being too amenable to lounging? - The management rule re not towel reserving? - The management not confronting rule breakers? - The claimant for participating in a practice he didn’t like only because he wasn’t fast enough or up early enough to win? - The tourist for not doing their homework and choosing a resort with insufficient sunlounger sharing ratios for peak attendance days? Sound familiar? We see this all the time. Clients bemused as to whether they don’t have enough of the right sized meeting rooms / desk / parking spaces etc, or whether they have employees who observe the right behaviours. What do you reckon? Where does the workplace equivalent of the sunlounger system typically fail its users? At design, implementation, or operation? Process design vs human nature vs organisational response?
Tim Oldman replied to a comment
1w
Lorena Knezevic absolutely right - and herein again is the issue. The increased adoption of voice prompting threatens to further impact the ability of colleagues around you to focus. And vice versa. You collaborating quietly and in a focused way with your agentic tools suddenly becomes a noise generating activity …
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Tim Oldman reacted on thisTim Oldman reacted on thisLa décision paramétrique. Le design paramétrique n'est pas encore prêt. La décision paramétrique, si. L'automatisation est entrée dans l'immobilier de bureau, et elle n'en sortira pas. La question n'est plus de savoir si les algorithmes vont peser sur les décisions spatiales, mais ce qu'on leur confie. Notre réponse est simple : le calcul, pas la création. Avant de tracer un trait, une direction immobilière doit répondre à des questions que personne ne sait traiter à la main. Ce plateau peut-il vraiment accueillir cette organisation ? À quelle densité, dans quelles règles, pour quel budget ? Lequel de ces trois immeubles convient le mieux, et de combien ? C'est là que spacefit.ai intervient. Des milliers d'aménagements générés et vérifiés, un score que l'on peut ouvrir, un brief enfin fondé sur des faits. Les algorithmes au cœur de la décision. Non, spacefit.ai ne remplace pas les designers. Il leur donne un brief qui tient, un client qui sait ce qu'il veut, et le temps de faire ce que les machines ne font pas : donner une âme au lieu. La bonne décision rend un projet possible. Le design, et la vie qui s'y installe, en font une réussite. Le meilleur fit, pas le premier. #Workplace #ImmobilierTertiaire #PropTech #Spacefit.ai ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Parametric design isn't ready, yet. Parametric decision is. Automation has entered office real estate, and it isn't leaving. The question is no longer whether algorithms will weigh on spatial decisions, but what we trust them with. Our answer is simple: the computing, not the creating. Before anyone draws a line, a real estate team has to answer questions no one can work through by hand. Can this floor actually hold this organisation? At what density, within which rules, for what budget? Which of these three buildings fits best, and by how much? That is where spacefit.ai comes in. Thousands of layouts generated and checked, a score you can open, a brief finally built on facts. Algorithms at the heart of the decision. No, spacefit.ai does not replace designers. It gives them a brief that holds, a client who knows what they want, and the time to do what machines cannot: give the place a soul. The right decision makes a project possible. Design, and the life that moves in, make it a success. The best fit, not the first fit. #Workplace #CRE #PropTech #Spacefit.ai
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Tim Oldman reacted on thisTim Oldman reacted on thisToo many restaurants are buying empty Heinz bottles and refilling them with cheap stuff. So Heinz responded… They printed the exact red colour around the border of the label, making the fake stuff easy to spot. They also released an Instagram filter called “Is That Heinz?” so anyone can scan & verify their sauce. The result: Sales increased & refills decreased massively. Creative marketing saves the day!! 👏
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Tim Oldman reacted on thisAnother insightful episode of Voice of the Occupier. Have a listen. 👂🏼Tim Oldman reacted on this📢 New 'Voice of the Occupier' episode now live! In this episode, Allison English sits down with Richard Jamison, UK Head of Property and Procurement at Grant Thornton, to discuss how workplace projects can deliver meaningful impact for people, businesses, and the wider community. Their conversation explores Grant Thornton's award-winning London office project, the role of sustainability and social value in workplace design, how reusing materials and engaging the supply chain can dramatically reduce carbon emissions, and why collaboration, accessibility, and long-term thinking are shaping the future of corporate real estate. If you're interested in workplace strategy, ESG, sustainable fit-outs, and creating spaces that make a lasting impact, this episode is well worth a listen. 🎧 Listen now: https://bit.ly/4rkqbla and in all major podcast directories. Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eTrXsQKR Spotify: https://lnkd.in/epjCgXBy #VoiceoftheOccupier #CREInsights #FutureOfWork #CoreNetGlobalUKVoice of the Occupier - Allison English & Richard JamisonVoice of the Occupier - Allison English & Richard Jamison
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Tim Oldman reacted on thisTim Oldman reacted on thisAnd in the middle of an airport is a Flamingo. The silver ceiling tiles resembling the water surface above it. Genius. Thank goodness for art installations in public places. That was a wonderful experience. What have you seen recently that stopped you in your tracks?
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Tim Oldman reacted on thisDanke Raphael Gielgen für den Gedanken. Du erinnerst Dich als wir die Tätigkeiten der Zukunft aufskizziert haben. Das Bild verändert sich. Genau das spüre ich jetzt täglich in allen Gesprächen. Organisation und die einzelnen MitarbeiterInnen scheinen überfordert. Alles sehnt sich nach Ruhe und Sicherheit. Die Antworten formulieren sich ganz schnell auch räumlich in und um den individuellen Arbeitsplatz - klare Lösung, kennen wir. Früher waren es die Ordner ;) Viel Stauraum viel Wissen. Nun tragen wir als Wissensarbeiter alles Wissen, Expertise und sogar den Dialog bei uns und sind immer weniger auf das „gemeinsame Denken“ angewiesen. Was heisst das also für unsere Arbeitswelt, die wir seit Jahrzehnten versuchen auf Kollaboration zu optimieren? Wenn sich die Lesbarkeit der Arbeit immer weiter in den digitalen Raum verschiebt welche Rolle haben dann Begegnung und Teamarbeit und gemeinsame Räume? Müssen wir also das gemeinsame Menschliche in der Arbeit auch wieder neu definieren?Tim Oldman reacted on thisSTECKEN SIE NICHT DIE TECHNOLOGIE VON MORGEN IN DIE ORGANISATION VON GESTERN UND NENNEN SIE DAS TRANSFORMATION. Ich spreche im Jahr gut 200 Mal mit Menschen – live auf Bühnen, in Unternehmen, in Workshops, per Video. Über die Zukunft der Arbeit, über AI, über Organisationen. Ein Thema ist dabei die größte Herausforderung der Unternehmen unserer Zeit. Wir reden über Copilots, Agents, Use Cases, Effizienz. Wir reden kaum über das System, in das wir sie hineinbauen. Unsere Organisationen stammen aus einer Welt, in der Wissen knapp war, Expertise konzentriert, Intelligenz menschlich. Auf diesen Annahmen beruhen Hierarchien, Rollen, Prozesse, Management-Layer. AI verändert diese Annahmen - aber wir behalten die Organisation. Genau da liegt das Problem. Weil Effizienz sich verkaufen, verbuchen und verantworten lässt – die eigene Organisation infrage zu stellen dagegen nicht. #FutureOfWork #AI #OrganizationalDesign
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Tim Oldman reacted on thisTim Oldman reacted on thisOffices are built for people who type but we are all about to start yapping to AI. Panel this morning at Wise's new office opening: what makes an office worth coming to? (also what a lovely office Wise has 😍) Light, good rooms, coffee, the people you actually want to see. All true. But look at an office today. It is quiet. Everyone types. Headphones on, one person on a call in the corner. That is about to flip. Working with AI is moving from typing to talking. I catch myself yapping at a model instead of writing a prompt, because voice is faster than fingers. Now put 60 people on one floor, all talking out loud to machines, all day. So either offices fill up with small rooms (omg cubicles? :D), or the office becomes the loud place and quiet work goes home for good. Which one are you building for? Thanks Tuuliki Poom from Wise, Liisa-Maria Lees from Swedbank, Aino-Silvia Tali moderating and Lars Trunin from Wise for a sharp one. Lightyear
Experience & Education
Publications
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The Curse of Open Plan
Julian Treasure (BBC Radio4)
See publicationBBC Radio 4 piece looking at the issue of acoustics in the open plan office (skip the news bulletin at the beginning).
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Health, Wellbeing and Productivity in Offices
The World Green Building Council
See publicationLeesman is recognised for its contribution to the development of sustainable workplaces in this new extensive WGBC document that presents overwhelming evidence that office design significantly impacts the health, wellbeing and productivity of staff.
Honors & Awards
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Media CEO of the Year 2018
CEO Monthly
Organizations
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Harvard Business Review
Member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council
Member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, an opt-in research community of business professionals
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