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Of course, even Isaacs wouldn't recommend that you immediately rush out and hire Jenny Jones as your organizational consultant, or that you structure your next meeting around such hot-button themes as "Employees Who Covet Their Boss's Parking Spot and the Women Who Love Them." But by looking at the company-as-talk-show model, you can discern some of the fundamental elements of that model -- and you can then adapt those elements to make your company, division, or team communicate more effectively.

For example, every good talk show, like every good talk-show company, has a great host -- a strong personality who has a vision for the show and who can set the tone; someone who understands that good conversation must be facilitated; someone who asks the right questions, who makes guests comfortable, and who continually reestablishes links with the audience.

Every good talk show also has a great set -- a stylish, fun, and highly functional environment that is familiar both to the guests and to the audience, and that encourages casual, spontaneous interaction. Finally, every good talk show has an effective, recognizable format -- a set of guidelines that let guests and audience members alike know what to expect: what kinds of guests will appear, where they'll sit in relation to the host, who will get to talk and when, and whether and when members of the audience will participate. Taken together, these elements create an inviting, evocative, and familiar space that puts guests at ease while priming the audience for something new -- a new talent, a new joke, a new idea -- all in an atmosphere that blends entertainment with education.

Broken down into these component parts, the talk-show model hardly represents breakthrough stuff. Managers and executives have always known that important decisions are made through casual talk, rather than at formal boardroom presentations. For that matter, employees instinctively know that organizations have two distinct communication networks: the formal and the informal. And they know to rely on the informal part -- the rumor mill, for example -- when they're trying to find out what's really happening.

What is new, however, is the argument that informal conversation should assume a more formal status; that it should be promoted as a key component of an organization's business model -- that companies should actively assume the role of talk-show host.

In fact, some companies have already begun experimenting with the notion of informal conversation -- among them, the design firm IDEO Product Development, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, and the Home Depot, an Atlanta-based hardware chain with stores in more than 800 North American cities. Together, their success stories serve as a guide for running your own company talk show -- and for getting the kind of ratings you need to keep your show on the air.

Ideo: All Great Talk Shows Need a Great Set

According to David Kelley, 48, president of Palo Alto - based IDEO Product Development, the best talk shows are those that expose the host to the most possible abuse. "You see a lot of hosts sitting behind their desks, hiding their body language from the guests and from the audience," says Kelley. "You've got to take away the desk, expose them, lower their status a little, so that no one feels uncomfortable asking questions."

Kelley is intimately familiar with the concept of exposure. For the past several years, the firm that designed cutting-edge products for such clients as PepsiCo, Apple Computer, Steelcase, and Eli Lilly has been looking hard at its own work environments, searching for ways to blow open the hierarchical barriers that thwart the flow of creative conversation. As a result, IDEO's work spaces are multidisciplinary and almost entirely devoid of special executive areas or status symbols, such as a conference table with a reserved seat for the boss. "The way I measure a good meeting is by the number of people who speak, who feel comfortable enough to ask questions," says Kelley. "And the way you encourage that is by lowering the status of the person who is leading the discussion."

IDEO's devotion to unfettered conversation isn't surprising. Like any creative enterprise, the $50 million firm depends on intensive collaboration among a diverse workforce of 350 industrial designers, electrical engineers, manufacturing specialists, and experts on "human factors." The more these people can cross-pollinate their talents, the better IDEO's projects will be. Yet, in a company that also depends on rapid iterations -- moving from concept to mock-up to finished project as quickly as possible -- getting together every member of every discipline and every project solely through conventional means is impossible. Instead, IDEO banks on randomness, using its talk-show set -- that is, its carefully stage-managed physical environment -- to increase the likelihood that individual interactions will happen on their own.