My brain wants freedom of thought!

Yes, we're starting to know: margins are shrinking, challenges are increasing, we all need to step it up. No matter which industry you look at, earning money with honest, dedicated work has become pretty difficult - unless you're advising companies out of business or blowing high-risk investments. Playing the lottery would currently be a more promising way to secure a basic personal income.

A panacea seems to be synergies. This clever-sounding term - (derived from Greek synergía = cooperation, verb: synergeĩn = to work together) - describes an act of sheer magic, because synergies turn less into more. And it works like this: For example, the staff that gets to stay has more to do afterwards thanks to the synergies; or everyone has to move together because the synergy is squeezing more people into fewer rooms (or one big one). This way they can distract each other even better from the work they took over from the dismissed colleague. So, contrary to the word's origin, synergy is more about pooling and shrinking the resources made available to get a job done than about working together.

Anyone who objects to mergers, bundling of competencies, flat hierarchies, open offices, flexible working hours, home offices, desk- and whatever-sharing models is usually booted out with the argument that Google does it too. Unfortunately, this is usually said by those who are completely unfamiliar with Google and the way its employees work. The beautiful fairy tale of the self-directed, smooth dovetailing of work and private life is a mean propaganda lie of exclusively profit-oriented companies, which German economics professor Christian Scholz also dismantles in his new book "Mogelpackung Work-Life Blending". Dissolving boundaries do not always mean freedom; and the possibility to work flexibly is anything but synonymous with the compulsion to be ever more flexible in doing one's bread and butter. Tacheles: We are talking about saving on the employee.

Tacheles: We are talking about saving on the employee.

At Deutsche Telekom's headquarters in Bonn, they have just dared to rebuild, tearing out partition walls and breaking up "work cells". The goal, however, was not to bring more people together in one room at fewer desks and computers, but "to create greater transparency. And a transparency that not only stands out in terms of building physics through the introduction of light and the elimination of partition walls, but also in terms of communication through openness and the joy of experimentation that triggers a new form of emotionality and freedom of thought," as Bernhard Zünkeler, managing director of the Orange Council advertising agency, explains in an interview. The agency provided strategic and communicative support for the conversion, together with the architectural firm Kubus.

One word in particular has stuck with me from this statement: freedom of thought. Of course, people need exchange so that their ideas don't get stuck in a muddled nirvana; but they also need places of retreat, the freedom to think alone somewhere, and not to have to lock themselves in the toilet to do so. People need doors that can be closed once in a while. Without causing gossip among colleagues and the boss.

Because for all the networking, collaboration, synergy generation: Our brains are still alone up there in our skulls. And mine, at least, likes to stay there alone.

Anne-Friederike Heinrich, Editor in Chief

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