Virtual Skyscrapers

There was an interesting article by Anil K Gupta in today’s telegraph where he argues that the long-standing symbol of the business world, the corporate HQ, will soon be no more. The days of an all-powerful, single location, world headquarters are numbered.

And yet the world is becoming simultaneously flatter and more spiky at the same time (see here). Many organisations are becoming increasingly distributed and outsourced. This fits with the fact that over 40m US citizens are self employed ‘free agents’ and 20% of UK workforce will soon be working from home.  And many corporations already have their ‘real’ HQ’s in far less glamorous locations for all sorts of practical reasons, so the central London HQ on the 50th floor is often less about the central hub and more about status and symbolism. 

So the demand for sky scrapers appears to be every increasing, but with the distributed organisation perhaps we need to invent virtual skyscrapers too.