Important lessons about work and life from open source and blogging (and Paul Graham): What Business Can Learn from Open Source.

The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. And it’s not just the way offices look that’s bleak. The way people act is just as bad.
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The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man’s land, where they’re neither working nor having fun.