They may be next door to one another or continents apart. This requires freer, faster flows of information. This will mean crisscrossing, up, down and sideways conduits - neural pathways that bust through the boxes in the table of organisation so that people can trade the ideas, data, formulae, hints, insights, facts, strategies, whispers, gestures and smiles that turn out to be essential to efficiency. The aspect of crisscrossing, up, down and sideways through a company is best achieved in a sphere. Pyramids are hard to move - so are mountains.
Spheres move easily.
It shows that in order to have a very rich fabric of services you don't need a regimented system of control. When there's a lot of intelligence at the fringes everywhere, the actual network itself can be fairly simple. Apply this concept to the virtual management structure. Here is a case where the centre management must allow control to be at the fringes. The trust factor increases - so does freedom.