Today the junior executive can get on a first-name basis 
with seniors in different parts of the country. “You just start 
telephoning. Anybody an walk into any manager’s office by 
telephone. By ten o’clock of the day I hit the New York office I 
was calling everybody by their first names.”

     The telephone is an irresistible intruder in time or place, so 
that high executives attain immunity to its call only when 
dining at head tables. In its nature the telephone is an intensely 
personal form that ignores all the claims of visual privacy prized 
by literate man. One firm of stockbrokers recently abolished all 
private offices for its executives, and settled them around a 
kind of seminar table. It was felt that the instant decisions that 
had to be made based on the continuous flow of teletype and 
other electric media could only receive group approval fast 
enough if private space were abolished. When on the alert, even