What Buckley is referring to here is the benefit of unity, of having everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship. There is a useful concept in psychology that, I think, makes it much clearer what he's speaking about. This is what University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Wegner calls "transactive memory." When we talk about memory, we aren't just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains. Most of us deliberately don't memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them — in a phone book, or in our personal Rolodex. Or we memorize the number 411, so we can call directory assistance. Nor do most of us know, say, the capital of Paraguay or some other obscure country. Why bother? It's an awful lot easier to buy an atlas and store that kind of information there. Perhaps most important, though, we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically. A few years ago, for example, Wegner set up a memory test with 59 couples, all of whom had been dating for at least three months. Half of the couples were allowed to stay together, and half were split up, and given a new partner whom they didn't know. Wegner then asked all the pairs to read 64 statements, each with an underlined word, like "Midori is a Japanese melon liqueur." Five minutes after looking at all the statements, the pairs were asked to write down as many as they could remember. Sure enough, the pairs who knew each other remembered substantially more items than those who didn't know each other. Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system — a transactive memory system — which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things. "Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self-disclosure," he writes. "Although it is probably more romantic to cast this process as one of interpersonal revelation and acceptance, it can also be appreciated as a necessary precursor to transactive memory." Transactive memory is part of what intimacy means. In fact, Wegner argues, it is the loss of this kind of joint memory that helps to make divorce so painful. "Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems," he writes. "They once were able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding… They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone… The loss of transactive memory feels like losing a part of one's own mind."

In a family, this process of memory sharing is even more pronounced. Most of us remember, at one time, only a fraction of the day-to-day details and histories of our family life. But we know, implicitly, where to go to find the answers to our questions — whether it is up to our spouse to remember where we put our keys or our thirteen-year-old to find out how to work the computer or our mother to find out details of our childhood. Perhaps more important, when new information arises, we know who should have responsibility for storing it. This is how, in a family, expertise emerges. The thirteen-year-old is the family expert on the computer not just because he has the greatest aptitude for electronic equipment or because he uses computers the most, but also because when new information about the family computer arises, he is the one assigned, automatically, to remember it. Expertise leads to more expertise. Why bother remembering how to install software if your son, close at hand, can do it for you? Since mental energy is limited, we concentrate on what we do best. Women tend to be the "experts" in child care, even in modern, dual-career families, because their initial greater involvement in raising a baby leads them to be relied on more than the man in storing child-care information, and then that initial expertise leads them to be relied on even more for child-care matters, until — often unintentionally — the woman shoulders the bulk of the intellectual responsibility for the child. "When each person has group-acknowledged responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable," Wegner says. "Each domain is handled by the fewest capable of doing so, and responsibility for the domains is continuous over time rather than intermittently assigned by circumstance."

When Jim Buckley says, then, that working at Gore is a "different kind of experience," what he is talking about, in part, is that Gore has a highly effective institutional transactive memory. Here, for example, is how one Gore associate describes the kind of "knowing" that emerges in a small plant: "It's not just do you know somebody. It's do you really know them well enough that you know their skills and abilities and passions. That's what you like, what you do, what you want to do, what you are truly good at. Not, are you a nice person." What that associate is talking about is the psychological preconditions for transactive memory: it's knowing someone well enough to know what they know, and knowing them well enough so that you can trust them to know things in their specialty. It's the re-creation, on an organization wide level, of the kind of intimacy and trust that exists in a family.

Now, of course, if you have a company that is making paper towels or stamping out nuts and bolts, you might not care. Not every company needs this degree of connectedness. But in a high-technology company like Gore, which relies for its market edge on its ability to innovate and react quickly to demanding and sophisticated customers, this kind of global memory system is critical. It makes the company incredibly efficient. It means that cooperation is easier. It means that you move much faster to get things done or create teams of workers or find out an answer to a problem. It means that people in one part of the company can get access to the impressions and expertise of people in a completely different part of the company. At Lucent, the 150 people in manufacturing may have their own memory network. But how much more effective would the company be if, like Gore, everyone in the plant was part of the same transactive system — if R amp;D was hooked into design and design into manufacturing and manufacturing into sales? "One of the immediate reactions we get when we talk to people is ' Man, your system sounds chaotic. How in the devil can you do anything with no obvious authority?' But it's not chaos. It isn't a problem," Burt Chase said. "It's hard to appreciate that unless you are working in it. It's the advantage of understanding people's strengths. It's knowing — where can I get my best advice? And if you have some knowledge about people, you can do that."

What Gore has created, in short, is an organized mechanism that makes it far easier for new ideas and information moving around the organization to tip — to go from one person or one part of the group to the entire group all at once. That's the advantage of adhering to the Rule of 150. You can exploit the bonds of memory and peer pressure. Were Gore to try to reach each employee singly, their task would have been much harder, just as Rebecca Wells's task would have been much harder if her readers came to her readings not in groups of six and seven but by themselves. And had Gore tried to put everyone in one big room, it wouldn't have worked either. In order to be unified — in order to spread a specific, company ideology to all of its employees — Gore had to break itself up into semi-autonomous small pieces. That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first. Rebecca Wells says that what she began to realize as the Ya-Ya epidemic grew was that it wasn't really about her or even about her book: it wasn't one epidemic focused on one thing. It was thousands of different epidemics, all focused on the groups that had grown up around Ya-Ya. "I began to realize," she said, "that these women had built their own Ya-Ya relationships, not so much to the book but to each other."