The Greatest Team Retreats, Ever
Part 1: Exile on Main Street
Remote working works for many people, as long as people still get together for occasional, purposeful meetings in real life (check out “How to Solve Remote Work’s Biggest Problem,” in The Atlantic).Creative, innovative, world-changing get-togethers have been a major source of TeamDay’s inspiration. We wanted to share with you some of our inspirations for TeamDays. We asked ourselves, what should the office be? Our answer: Exile on Main Street.
The Rolling Stones started the album Exile on Main Street – their 10th – in 1969 in a London recording studio. It remained unfinished and by 1971 the Stones were in self-imposed exile from the UK (that’s another story). Mick Jagger had moved to Paris, and the other members of the band had relocated to the south of France.
Keith Richards rented the Villa Nellcôte in Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice. It is a 16-room Belle Epoque mansion built in the 1890s. The villa was fantastic (“like Versaiiles,” Keith said), but the band worked in the hot, dank, cavernous basement, grinding it out for 7 hours per day, every day, for about a month.
The result was an album that many music critics have called the best rock-and-roll album in history.
Certainly, a number of things went into making this album (and also a lot of other drama that you probably don’t want to emulate), but one of the things we found inspiring about it was that they were a group that had left town and were basically dislocated (let’s just call it remote working). They started the album in a normal studio, but it wasn’t coming together – what might be called an office. Instead of heading into another studio, they found an inspiring location, got together, and spent weeks away from the crowds to collaborate on something that has fascinated the world for decades.
Of course, your company may not need a villa in the south of France to hold a retreat (or bring instruments and equipment, or make an album). But maybe your team has reached a point where you need to get together to reconnect and dream up something big. Or you need to focus on something important enough that an in-person collaboration session would help you cut through the morass quicker and better.
Keith Richards rented the Villa Nellcôte in Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice. It is a 16-room Belle Epoque mansion built in the 1890s. The villa was fantastic (“like Versaiiles,” Keith said), but the band worked in the hot, dank, cavernous basement, grinding it out for 7 hours per day, every day, for about a month.
The result was an album that many music critics have called the best rock-and-roll album in history.
Certainly, a number of things went into making this album (and also a lot of other drama that you probably don’t want to emulate), but one of the things we found inspiring about it was that they were a group that had left town and were basically dislocated (let’s just call it remote working). They started the album in a normal studio, but it wasn’t coming together – what might be called an office. Instead of heading into another studio, they found an inspiring location, got together, and spent weeks away from the crowds to collaborate on something that has fascinated the world for decades.
Of course, your company may not need a villa in the south of France to hold a retreat (or bring instruments and equipment, or make an album). But maybe your team has reached a point where you need to get together to reconnect and dream up something big. Or you need to focus on something important enough that an in-person collaboration session would help you cut through the morass quicker and better.