Two casually dressed young men are circling an elegantly designed billiard table on the ground floor of a spacious atrium. The sound of billiard balls is barely audible for the men's colleagues in the offices facing the atrium. It's 1 p.m., just after standard Norwegian lunchtime, but the billiard players have decided to extend the break.

Employees of the phone company playing pool when they ought to be working may sound like every customer's -- and shareholder's -- worst nightmare. But believe it or not, this is the kind of image that Telenor, the Nasdaq-listed Norwegian telecom group, likes to show visitors to their brand-new headquarters at Fornebu just outside the capital, Oslo.

With the new headquarters Telenor wishes to send a strong message, directed both at employees and the company's Norwegian customers: Freedom, flexibility and few visible signs of hierarchy shall enhance creativity and productivity.

As other former monopolists around Europe struggle with their staid ways and heavy debt loads, Norway's previously purely state-owned, slow and unpopular monopolist has become an internationalized, dynamic organization capable of competing in the global market (although the Norwegian state still owns 77.7% of the company).

The company, which eschewed Europe's high-priced 3G auctions of recent years in favor of growth in less-mature markets such as Bangladesh and Russia, bucked the trend in another way late last month, reporting sharply higher earnings for the second quarter of 2002. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization rose to 3.2 billion Norwegian crowns ($423 million) from 2.2 billion a year ago. Competitors and peers should take note; uprooting the ingrained hierarchies left over from the monopolies may be just the right medicine for this formerly bureaucratic state company.

Creating Telenor's new image has not been done overnight. Four years after Norway's telecom market was liberalized, Telenor still has a very dominant market position and is an easy target whenever a customer is faced with bad service from one of the group's companies. Memories of the monopoly days are still vivid. As late as the early 1980s, it was considered normal to wait years just to get a simple telephone line installed.

But if that is the past, Fornebu is billed as the future. Some 7,500 employees will have their offices here when construction is completely finished later this month. Though "bases" would be more correct than "offices." In principle, no one has an office or desk they can call their own. Instead, each employee is equipped with a laptop, a mobile phone and the freedom to work where they choose. Even the new CEO, Jon Fredrik Baksaas, says he'll stick to this policy.

If you are the first at work in the morning, you can claim the desk with the best view. Moving from their previous office locations, employees weren't allowed to bring more personal effects than fit into a very small rail station-style locker. Family pictures on the desk are banished -- replaced by digital photos on the laptop screen. If you plan to be away from your temporary desk for more than two hours, you must remove your things to make it available for someone else.

Even so, the building and surrounding area is also a wireless-network zone, making it feasible to bring the laptop to one of several coffee shops and cafes, or to the atrium area with the billiard table. Or maybe outside, if you want a view of the Oslo fjord on a nice day.

Norwegians may be better prepared for a business regime of flexibility than many other nationalities. Traditionally members of an egalitarian society, Norwegians tend to be strongly skeptical toward formal hierarchy anyway, and leaders offering freedom with responsibility have a much greater chance of succeeding than those favoring regimes of strict control. And even in an oil-rich nation, a strong work ethic has survived, giving flexibility a solid basis.

Building a huge, new office complex in the Oslo area also sends a different message, confirming the trend of centralization. Peripherally located communities must try other strategies to make themselves more attractive to businesses and stop people leaving for cities -- above all the magnet Oslo. And just as the Fornebu complex is using technology to decentralize its operations, entire communities are finding ways to turn technology and telecommunications to their advantage.

The mountainous community of Modalen in Western Norway has an especially smart plan. Through taxes from hydroelectric power production, the community's politicians have the financial freedom to make ambitious investments. The decision to offer free broadband Internet access to all 350 inhabitants has proved to be an astonishingly effective PR move. Modalen has been visited by TV crews and delegations coming from as far away as India and Russia, according to the municipal authority's IT manager Harald Kjensli.

Modalen became instantly famous as a global broadband village. But did the project cure the real problem -- the loss of people and employment? "Without broadband connection there wouldn't have been so much employment in IT companies here. We already had an IT sector that has been strengthened," Mr. Kjensli says.

What most visiting media in Modalen haven't noticed is the radically improved physical communication with the nearby region. A new road that was opened in 1996 has made it possible for Modalen's inhabitants to drive to Norway's second largest city, Bergen, in just 75 minutes. Modalen can fight the trend of centralization only by becoming a kind of suburb of Bergen, offering its inhabitants a previously unheard-of flexibility: Business opportunities and urban attractions in addition to the beautiful scenery -- and impeccable Internet facilities.

At Telenor's headquarters, 28-year-old economist Karsten Eriksen reflects on his first experiences with the hyperflexible office environment: Maybe surprisingly, he senses that the open-plan office design and high mobility have a tendency to reduce social contact between people in his department and make his workday more concentrated. The noise level must be kept low. "I would actually say that these offices set stronger borders between work and breaks than traditional offices," Mr. Eriksen says.

Communicating flexibility as a core value in all work routines and removing the visible signs of hierarchy, Telenor stands a good chance of making its digital-nomad concept work at the Fornebu headquarters. The goodwill of Norwegians, on the other hand, can in the long run only be won by showing the same flexibility toward customers that the company demands of its own employees.

In the atrium, the men by the billiard table aren't joined by anyone else, and we don't see many of their colleagues in the coffee shops either. No one is relaxing in the fancy designer bubble chairs. While some are outside enjoying the nice weather, most have returned to their departments, sitting down at their temporary desks. Working.