[coldtea]

>Disagree strongly. Creativity often comes from people synthesizing ideas that wouldn't ordinarily meet, and especially not in a way that can be planned by management.

That's totally orthogonal to "hallway" meetings.

To put it another way, if you can't do the above over IM/Skype/email/etc, you're doing it wrong.

[JohnBooty]

I put "hallway" in quotes because it doesn't have to be a literal hallway. I agree that IM/Skype/email/etc is fine for them (and even better, in many ways).