As we’ve learned, managers in office settings fixated on eliminating the overhead of synchronous communication—the annoyance of phone tag or taking the elevator to a different floor to chat with someone in person. They believed that eliminating this overhead using tools like email would make collaboration more efficient. Computer scientists, meanwhile, came to the opposite conclusion. Investigating asynchronous communication from the perspective of algorithm theory, they discovered that spreading out communication with unpredictable delays introduced tricky new complexities. While the business
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