Don’t blame me for that title – all those words are in a particularly nice article over on BW, “‘Mosh Pits’ Of Creativity“, that does it’s own spelunking. There’s lots of good stuff in this one, but this paragraph in the very beginning caught my attention:

To hustle the phone into production, Motorola engineers left their cubicles in Libertyville to team up with designers and marketers 50 miles to the southeast in Moto City. With its open spaces and waist-high cubicles for even senior managers, the lab fostered teamwork and a breaking down of barriers — both of which contributed to the success of the project. Razr developers, for instance, bypassed a normal process of running new-product ideas past regional managers across the world. Because they wanted to lead the market, not just give managers and customers what they thought they wanted, the Razr team put aside normal practices. “We did not want to be distracted by the normal inputs we get,” says Gary R. Weiss, senior director of mechanical engineering. “It would not have allowed us to be as innovative.”

With PLM software’s growing sophistication and eventual move to ubiquity, and then incorporating new business practices such as ROWE (and finding out it works!), I expect the future Moto City will be a virtual construct.