4. The Death of Distance?: Measuring the Power of Proximity

With companies not just to a single location, but more and more frequently spread across the globe, how much does having a water cooler (see Chapter 3) really matter today? It’s not hard to imagine that the water cooler effect will gradually fade in importance as workforces become more and more distributed and as technologies allow workers to collaborate more effectively across huge distances.

The revolution in communication technologies continues, slowly lowering the barriers to remote work. From e-mail to instant messaging to video conferencing, each has served to make collaboration over distance much easier than in the past.

For decades these communication technologies did not fundamentally ...

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