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There are no hours-worked expectations for exempt/salaried employees. We do not talk about how many hours we work or demand 40, 50, or 60 hours out of people.

We do not have a tele-work policy, handbook or tele-work rules. Tele-work is so 1970's, Work is just work. It doesn't need a location label, And, we don't have flextime.

We do not track PTO (vacation, sick time, personal time, holiday time). It's not a benefit. Unlimited paid time off as long as the work gets done is the contemporary benefit that matters.

Nobody asks permission to go to an appointment, event or any other personal activity. Ever. And they don't have to inform the team or management in an effort to be polite.

We have adopted the Sludge* Eradication Strategy - NO SLUDGE in our workplace.

We NEVER put 'mandatory' on a meeting invite. Every meeting is optional.

We don't have any limits put on how or when we can work: "No E-Mail Fridays" and "No Meeting Wednesdays" don't exist in our organization. 

But arguably no big business has smashed the clock quite so resolutely as Best Buy. The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done.

So bullish are Anderson and his team on the idea that they have formed a subsidiary called CultureRx, set up to help other companies go clockless. CultureRx expects to sign up at least one large client in the coming months.

It seems to be working. Since the program's implementation, average voluntary turnover has fallen drastically, CultureRx says. Meanwhile, Best Buy notes that productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE.

"It wasn't hugs and smiles," she says of Ressler's and Thompson's campaign. "Managers in the old mental model were totally irritated." In the e-learning division, many of Wells's older co-workers (read 40-year-olds; the average age at Best Buy is 36) expressed resentment over the change, insisting that work relationships are better face-to-face, not screen-to-screen. "We have people in our group who are like, `I'm not going to do it,'" says Wells, who likes to sleep in and doesn't own an alarm clock. "I'm like, `that's fine, but I'm outta here.'" In enemy circles, Ressler and Thompson are known to this day as "those two" and "the subversives."

`How are you going to measure this so you know you're getting the same productivity out of people?'"

Achen could see that not only was his team's productivity up, but engagement scores, or measuring job satisfaction and retention, were the highest in the dot-com division's history.

"For years I had been focused on the wrong currency," says Thompson. "I was always looking to see if people were here. I should have been looking at what they were getting done."

Achen says he would never go back. Orders processed by people who are not working in the office are up 13% to 18% over those who are. ROWE'ers are posting higher metrics for quality, too. Achen says he believes that's due to the new office paradox: Given the constant distractions, it sometimes feels impossible to get any work done at work.

But it's worth remembering that most big companies fail to grow at the rate of inflation. That's true in part because the bigger the company gets, the harder it is to get the best out of each and every employee. ROWE is one of Best Buy's answers to avoiding that fate. "The old way of managing and looking at work isn't going to work anymore," says Ressler. "We want to revolutionize the way work gets done." Admit it, you're rooting for them, too.

One blogger from tech site Mashable found this week that Google's Ad Preferences page assume that she was middle-aged - and a man, simply because her interests included technology and computing.  The profile page, called Ad Preferences, is hidden away inside a settings menu in Google Accounts, but can be accessed directly here. This sort of in-depth profiling raises alarm bells with privacy activists. 'Consumers have increasingly digital lives and they are developing an unfathomably large data trail every day,' says Rainey Reitman, activism director for privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'There has never been another time in history where privacy was under the kind of assault it is today.'You can opt out of the tracking, or manually edit your details. Google also  does not store information on controversial subjects such as pornography. The Ad preferences page came to public attention following a sweeping change to 'privacy policy' which comes into effect on March 1, although the preferences page was launched some time ago. YouTube data, Gmail information and search data will all be used to build up ever more accurate advertising profiles and also the company claims it will make searches more personalised.

Frictionless experiences: You never get a prompt asking if you want to share on Facebook. Instead, everything you do in an app gets added to your timeline.

Real Time Serendipity: If you see a friend playing a song, you can click it and Spotify will start playing that song on your computer. That activity shows up in your ticker too, which means your friends can see that you're sharing music

See what your friends are playing, monitor their activity.

Lifestyle Apps: Example, Nike Plus, which tracks your running activity, will automatically post to Facebook. Also works with Foodspotting to share the stuff you're eating.

"It is like something out of 1984," Khan told the Guardian. "If a council can take this kind of action against one of its own councillors simply because they don't like what I say, what hope is there for freedom of speech or privacy?"