Right about the office.

I spent twenty-five years in a room with a door and my last eight in an open-plan floor with ninety-one desks on it, so the chapters about offices didn't have to work hard on me. I counted the desks once, during a long telephone call. Ninety-one, and four of them belonged to people whose job was to think quietly.

She is good on that, and better on group work. The material about brainstorming producing fewer and worse ideas than the same people working separately and pooling afterwards matches everything I saw in forty years of design reviews. We knew it on site; nobody had written it down where a manager might read it.

Where it thins out is the science underneath. There is a lot of weight resting on temperament studies that get a paragraph each, and I would have preferred fewer claims held up properly to this many held up loosely. She also writes as though the quiet person is reliably the more thoughtful one, and I have known some very stupid quiet men, one of whom I reported to.

Six. Worth the first third. I gave my copy to a young engineer who had just been moved onto an open floor and was too polite to say what she thought of it.