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> I'd want to foster a corporate culture of extreme openness and collaboration inside the walls

Open space offices are entirely othogonal to this idea.





Even (information) openness and collaboration themselves are orthogonal. You can certainly have one without the other. Then the physical openness is another dimension. And so on and so forth.

So we'd need more information to know whether or not Apple is best optimized in all these, and more, dimensions. Way more information than we'd ever get from one person or team. (Definitely way more than Apple would ever give out.)


How so? I'd argue that while open-plan offices can profoundly affect people's productivity and morale, they have relatively little impact on collaboration or communication - I view these more as functions of the team's culture.

As long as your group makes a conscious effort to bounce ideas around and ask each other for advice, what's the difference between sitting at a table wearing headphones or in an office with the door shut? Or, for that matter, everyone being remote?

I can kind of see how you could make a case that open-plan offices change the dynamic of communication, i.e. they make people less willing to "bother" their coworkers, but collaboration can (and probably should, most of the time) happen asynchronously over slack or email or post-it note anyway.


That’s what “orthogonal” means, in this context … :-)


Whoops, thanks for that. I must've read it as 'antithetical.'




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