Rudy Giuliani popularized the broken windows theory of policing, which has been heavily criticized during the past decade. The lesser known but related no windows theory of corporate governance, however, has faced no such criticism. Our team of unpaid interns was unable to find a single peer-reviewed article that was critical of the no windows theory.
Although it seems obvious in retrospect, Sidney Gottlieb’s groundbreaking article, The More You See The Less You Know, was poorly received when he published it in 1951. The chilly reception, which historians now attribute to anti-semitism, drove Gottlieb away from the private sector and into the arms of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA provided Gottlieb with the resources to develop and test several variations of his no windows theory in a series of experiments now known as Project MKUltra.
Project MKUltra gained a small amount of attention from the trust-fund liberal set, who pilloried the failures of Gottlieb’s most creative experiments without acknowledging his many successes. Any entrepreneur knows that high risk means high reward no matter what limitations might be imposed by facts, laws, or basic human decency. The CIA attempted to limit the negative publicity attracted by Project MKUltra and kept even its many successes confidential. The striking success of Gottlieb’s no windows experiments were not published until April 2019.
Here at ProfessionalBusiness.Company, we know you have too many jobs to create to spend time slogging through a detailed explanation, so we asked our interns to summarize Gottlieb’s findings. In short, Gottlieb’s experiments proved that workers with no windows in their offices were significantly less likely to look outside than those with a window in their lines of sight. When clocks and windows were removed from an office, workers were significantly less likely to know how many days they had spent at their desks.
We doubt that the CIA will release un-redacted copies of Gottlieb’s reports, but if it does, you will read about it here. Remember, if it is not making dollars, then it is not making sense.