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This low-hassle, free-information attitude also shows up in Home Depot's regular how-to clinics -- mini talk shows on plumbing, tile work, or lighting, along with seasonal and regional topics, such as deck building during the summer or hurricane preparation for customers in coastal communities. Home Depot promotes and plans its clinics with the same kind of care that goes into marketing and staging a successful talk show: It advertises them on signs near store entrances, it holds them at night for maximum convenience for do-it-yourselfers with day jobs -- and, as a result, it draws good audiences. For example, one recent clinic on hurricane preparation in Florida attracted more than 100 customers. The format and the hands-on setting of the clinics encourage attendees to ask questions of the company's experts -- and, at the end of each clinic, customers leave with the understanding that any unasked or unanswered questions can easily be followed up with a phone call to the store the next day.

And for customers who can't wait for a scheduled clinic, Home Depot staffers like McMillan give impromptu private lessons in the aisle. One of McMillan's most ambitious lessons involved showing a home owner how to rewire his entire house. "It took about an hour and a half," says McMillan. "But he got it."

Xerox PARC: The Best Talk Shows Are MultiMedia Events

Walking into Xerox PARC, a low, bunkerlike building carved into a Palo Alto hillside, is like entering the set of a science-fiction movie: "Office Workers of the 21st Century." In a conference room on the main floor, a digital camera high in one corner automatically records everything that a small group of conferring researchers have scrawled on a whiteboard. Along the hallways outside, wall-mounted, touch-sensitive computer monitors give wandering researchers instant access to a listing of future meetings and seminars.

Welcome to the high-tech company talk show. Just as TV talk shows use video, music, and even phone and email to keep the show moving and to stay connected with guests and audiences, so PARC is a humming, beeping demonstration of how talk-show companies can use multimedia technology to keep the talk flowing. But the key, says Jack Whalen, 49, a research scientist in PARC's Scientific and Engineering Reasoning Area, is to make sure that everyone is clear about priorities: The technology follows the talk. "Instead of saying, 'Here's some technology. Let's see how we can use it to help people work better,' " says Whalen, "you have to look at the systems that people have invented to get their work done, and then ask how you can support those systems with technology."

In other words, smart talk shows use gadgets to amplify and improve the ways that "guests" and "hosts" already interact. Studying the links between technology and talk has become a PARC specialty. Whalen, for example, is a sociologist and anthropologist who first examined the links between technology and informal communication when he was working on a project to improve the effectiveness of 911 call centers. Whalen learned that many 911 operators communicated with one another constantly -- not by phone or email, but through an informal system of verbal and visual cues. By keeping one ear tuned to the background noise of the call center, operators could quickly tell when a colleague needed help.

Later, at PARC, Whalen found that similar systems had developed among the Xerox technicians who helped customers over the phone or in the field. In all cases, workers had leveraged their personal relationships to jury-rig systems that helped them do their work -- systems that were invisible to management and that management could inadvertently disrupt or undermine through ill-considered (if well-intentioned) changes. In one case, Whalen recalls, managers of a West Coast 911 call center decided that the noise of an open-office environment was too distracting. To remedy the problem, the managers built high-wall cubicles -- which cut operators off from the verbal and visual cues that they had come to rely on.

After much experimentation, PARC has been able to support informal networks and casual conversation throughout Xerox. Take, for example, the company's use of whiteboards. A highly sophisticated version, known as the "zombie board," uses a camera that not only records whatever scribblings go on the board but also scans, prints, and even pans across the room to a second whiteboard. And users can make all of this happen via quickly drawn symbols.

The low-tech version, found in nearly every public space in PARC, has no recording cameras, but it is huge -- usually running from floor to ceiling. Because of the board's size, researchers can talk and scribble for a longer period of time before they have to erase, and colleagues who pass by can see the evolution of the conversation, without having to ask to have everything repeated.