Inside the Elephant Room at Kayak.com

There’s an elephant in the room at Kayak.com. No, not the travel website’s recent $1.8 billion acquisition by Priceline.com. An actual elephant—a two-foot-tall stuffed animal named Annabelle that Kayak’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Paul English, bought and put in a conference room. “So often at work, people have issues that they can’t resolve because they won’t talk about it,” says English. “I don’t like that. We try to be shockingly transparent about everything here.” Annabelle is a symbol of that.

English runs Kayak’s 100-person office in Concord, Mass. (one of three Kayak offices worldwide), with a system he likes to call “planned anarchy.” Everyone has the freedom to work on what they want when they want, meetings contain only the most essential people, and employees are encouraged to be honest with each other. But Kayak has an open floor plan, and co-workers don’t like to discuss touchy matters at their cubicles in front of everyone. So last year, English renovated a conference room and brought in Annabelle the elephant.