Bob,

That is one of the reasons that folks in cubicles use headsets to either pipe in some background music, motivating music, or silence to obscure ambient noise and do the "big-thinking heavy-concentrating activities".

-Eduardo

Joel Spolsky has written an often-referenced piece about what he calls the bionic office. One of his points is how you can attract better talent when you can promise them better accommodations. That's more useful in a small shop like Joel's than it would be in a large corporate environment.

But the other point is how much more productive your people are when they have good offices. The trick is, can you manage the inevitable bickering when the people who need privacy get it, and others don't? This will make the Marv's dual-head Mac seem like nothing in comparison.

I've seen lots of articles about why certain activities require more isolation than people usually get in a modern office. What I haven't seen is anything about how to manage the discord you generate when you try to do something about it.

If you have a few children, you understand very well the challenge of explaining the difference between "equal" and "fair". Unfortunately many adults I know seem to have missed this lesson. And many managers, as you say, don't have the character to "manage" this difficult truth, erring down the "easy" path to mediocrity.

No wonder Dilbert is so popular.

Somebody ought to do a study - "Who needs Privacy & When?"
Compare me to my wife (both over 50):
At home or running errands, I am very linear, getting first one thing, then a second, etc. accomplished (often forgetting at least 1 item on my list).
While at work, I write code for one application in one window, answer eMails in another, research user questions (on a different app) in a third, and answer my phone on the 3rd ring. All while the people sitting 4 feet from me are doing the same. (plus one thing they hate: contribute wise cracks to _their_ conversations, w/o actually participating)

Contrast my wife: at home she is the queen of household multi-tasking, cooking, washing (clothes & dishes) and conversing intelligently on the day's news, our bills, etc, with the TV on in the background.
But at work, she has always had, and can't seem to concentrate without, a private office and an answering machine so that she can ignore her phone when she needs to.

(And don't talk about our multi-IMing, IPoding & gaming son)

I'll give you one company's approach to cubes, from the perspective of a consultant.

My first cube was so small that when I leaned back in my chair, I was in the hallway. I could touch the left-side and right-side walls at the same time. And I shared it with another consultant!

They also minimized the productivity of all consultants by giving them the slowest and most unreliable computers. I was running a 33 MHz Pentium when everyone else had 100 MHz Pentiums. No problem, I was making 3x per hour more than the employees.

Eventually, I became a team leader. They had to move me out of the shared micro-cube to something "bigger" as befit my elevated status, so they moved me to the same size cube as my direct reports. At least the walls were 5 feet high, instead of the waist-high walls upstairs in the call center.

Then they moved the entire staff to a new building, and the corporate decree was that every leader got a hard-wall office with a window. This was because they had "unlimited" space in the new building.

During the move, someone realized that I wasn't an employee. So, of the zillions of new offices being built, they went to a lot of trouble to find a space that could have a hard-wall office without a window.

The joke was on them, because I never had any sunlight glare, all conversations were completely private, and I could take a nap when needed (those 60-hour weeks get to you sometimes).

They're still in business, but keep wondering why they can't seem to make a profit...

Bob, you never wrote about interruptions in these work environments? I could have sworn I remembered the one-liner from you, "Anybody who thinks an open floor plan (without even cubicle walls) just needs to watch a cheesy cop drama on TV to see how conducive it is."

I can tell you that short cubie walls can be very demoralizing. A few years ago I was hired as the Assistant I.T. Director for a county school district. I had no idea upon hire that everyone in the department, except my boss, sat in a cubie with those wretched three-foot-high walls. No privacy whatsoever during phone calls, having a tea break, or even while scratching your nose, much less when having a face to face conversation. It reminded me of the old secretarial pools and how they were treated like cattle in the crowd. I quit after three weeks, the lack of privacy being one factor. And no, there was no other place for me to be stationed in the building.

The reason you have trouble with low cubicle walls is from the actual purpose of the cubicle design.

Cubicles are designed to deal with the human vision startle reflex and prevent repeated subliminal triggering of this reflex.

The problem was discovered when knowledge workers using the first prototypes of close-spaced office workstations began to have mental breaks.

Low walls should be used where there is little human traffic beside a concentrating worker. They are also used for work that does not require full mental investment such as phone sales.