My take on why the best jobs and the best employees are <i>local</i> jobs and <i>local</i> employees[1] is modeled in terms of the bandwidth and latency issue of communications.<p>I did a lightning talk at the 2009 Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference using that theme.  I posted the text and slides of that talk on my blog:<p><a href="http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/2009/11/joe-plumber-and-control-theory.html" rel="nofollow">http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/2009/11/joe-plumber-and-co...</a><p>[1] Distributed companies do work, but it is a lot harder to make them work well.