Acknowledgements

This chapter is reprinted with permission from Sloan Management Review 38, no. 2 (Winter 1997), 23–36. An earlier version was presented at the Harvard Business School Colloquium on "Multimedia and the Boundaryless World" to be published in S. P. Bradley and R. L. Nolan, eds., Multimedia and the Boundaryless World, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997. Portions were also included in a presentation at the International Conference on Information Systems, G. M. Wyner and T. W. Malone, "Cowboys or Commanders: Does Information Technology Lead to Decentralization?", in Cleveland, Ohio, December 15–18, 1996. The author acknowledges the support of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and the MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, the excellent research assistance of Andrea Meyer, and helpful conversations with George Wyner, Erik Brynjolfsson, Art Kleiner, and Albert Wenger.