BusinessWeek had an article on Google a couple of days ago. I totally agree with one of the comments made by Eric Schmidt …

So you still need that face-to-face contact?
The best programming team is a “telephone call,” which is two people, you and I, programming together. The second-best programming team is, everybody fits into a single room. All other variants are bad.

What obstacles does Google face in continuing to innovate?
A problem that we face now is that we have people in multiple sites. It’s a problem that everybody faces, but we’re going to face it bad. We have, like, 50 locations.

Why aren’t many other companies doing this, too?
I think it’s cultural. You have to have the culture, and you have to get it right.

I work for a company which is truly global with a lot more sites than even Google. There is a significant percentage (and growing) who do not work in a traditional office environment. I am not saying this new work dispersion is bad. What is bad is believing “a distributed workforce it is just as effective at innovation and creativity as a collocated one”. How do you balance a disbursed work force and innovation ? Easy. “Get together”. I’m not say companies should move everyone back together because the entire life cycle of a project is not a creative process.

Projects need to account for travel and team building. “Account” is perhaps a dual chosen word. Companies regularly plead poverty and cut all but sales reacted travel with the goal of delivering better revenue quarterly results. This myopic view is one of the killing forces acting on many American companies. The log term view is gone. The result is a lot of crisis, reactionary, energy sucking behavior.

The best of both worlds – for both the employees and employers – is to leverage the improved work options for employees and savings for companies while setting aside some of those savings for team face-to-face activities. … As Google’s Eric Schmidt says; “You have to have a set of necessary conditions for innovation to occur.” I call this “culture”.

At Google, engineers spend about 20% of their time on projects outside their main job. “The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them and their executives. [The 20% rule is] a systematic way of making sure a middle manager does not eliminate that innovation.”, says Schmidt.

I could not get away saying, “… I will give you everything I’ve got, 80% of [my time].”