No matter how much you flatten the hierarchies at your company, communication can't improve if people's desks are stuck ten floors away from the folks they ought to be chatting with regularly. To fix this problem, more and more companies are moving into shorter, wider buildings--abandoning skyscrapers that forced them to inhabit 20 different floors in order to fit everyone in one place. The idea is to create more spontaneous face-to-face contacts. 'If you only have to walk down the hallway to talk to people, not only will you talk to them in person but you'll probably bump into other interesting people along the way,' says James Nixon, who manages real estates for Andersen Worldwide. The people you bump into tend to get more interesting as the building gets flatter as well. Like layer cakes, with flavors separated by creamy floors of frosting, tall buildings segregate people into functional ghettos. If you work in finance, you'll see nothing but number crunchers every day. Take those accountants and toss them into the mix in a flatter building, however, and they'll run into the marketing and operations folks whose money they manage. The trend to horizontal building is most noticeable on the edges of metropolitan areas, where space is not so constrained. In Silicon Valley, 3Com and Silicon Graphics have chosen to build flat. But old-line companies in urban areas, like Owens Coming and Alcoa, have found ways to flatten themselves physically too. Along with improving communication, these companies are looking to enhance their corporate Cultures. The boss who signs off on such structures can gain a lot from flat buildings as well. 'In a three-storey building, you can put yourself at the center, surrounded on every side by the people you want to influence,' says Gene Kohn, an architect at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York City. 'Lower buildings are much more appropriate for strong leaders who want to be seen by and communicate with the largest number of people.' Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the passage as one of the advantages of lower buildings?