This guy just keeps coming, shooting and hitting. Paul Graham's OSCON keynote speech, "What Business Can Learn From Open Source". Good stuff to read for everyone (not open source only, nor software-only).

I tried to cut snippets to put here... but each para is just full of stuff its unfair to (paste anything here and) leave anything behind!... I'll just copy some random para now, don't take it as any hint of the gist of his speech:


Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation-- breaking people's day up into bits too small to be useful.

You can see how dependent you've become on something by removing it suddenly. So for big companies I propose the following experiment. Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden-- where everyone has to sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on things they can do without talking to anyone else. Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I'm sure many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could do by themselves. You could call it "Work Day."