What's holographic? Does that mean companies created by laser beams? Can you see around the corners of them as you move from side to side, like those funny fuzzy pictures you see in the hologram store in the Mall of America?

No, not exactly, but that's close. Closer still might be the Star Wars scene where the little robot, R2D2, projects a small, grainy 3D image of Princess Leia asking for the help of Obi-wan Kenobe.

Holo means whole or all. Graphic means picture. Whole Picture. All of the picture.

Take a real hologram, not a cheap artistic Mall of America hologram, but a genuine laboratory-produced hologram of, say, a tree. Cut it in half, and do that 20 more times. The resulting piece is very small, yet when you shine a laser beam through this tiny remnant of your picture, which part of the tree shows up? The trunk? The leaves? The bark? No.

Eerily, the entire tree shows up. It's grainy. It's lacking detail. No matter how small you cut a piece of a hologram, every piece contains the whole picture. If you think that sounds like magic, wait till you see what it does for your company when every employee contains the whole picture.

When each and every employee understands the company, the mission, the product, the financial position, the corporate culture and pretty much everything else, then you have a holographic organization.

Not every employee's picture includes the same level of detail or clarity. But every employee can project, a little like R2D2, the general outlines of the organization.

One very important part of that general outline is the question of where your company is located and why it is located there, rather than being somewhere else.

If every one of your employees can't explain clearly why your company is where it is, you've got a problem, and it's a training problem. Worse, if the management team can't explain clearly why your company is where it is, to the exclusion of all other locations, you've got a problem, and it's a location problem.

When you explain this in the board room, you'll need examples of this concept so you don't get thrown out as soon as you say "holographic" or "Obi-wan Kenobe".

There are two examples that you should be familiar with.

The first is our universe. Have you ever wondered why scientists split atoms to learn about the Big Bang? It's because they believe that atoms have the same properties as the universe as a whole. Whole picture. Each of the parts has embedded in it the whole picture.

The second is DNA. Give a scientist one of your liver cells and enough money and in a few weeks he'll produce a grainy picture of you, brown eyes and all. (Someday, he'll be able to make another one of you ... a clone.) Each part -- through our DNA structure -- has embedded in it the whole picture.

As for company examples, I can think of two that I have had personal experience with: Disney and Federal Express.

In these two cases, the picture is a simple one: For Disney, the basic picture is: "If we overwhelm the customer with happiness and opportunities to have fun and be happy themselves, we'll make a lot of money."

For Federal Express, the basic picture is: "If we deliver packages faster and earlier than the other guys, and look happy and efficient while we do it, we'll make a lot of money."

Most of these employees can tell you a lot about their company, especially the corporate culture. The ones that cannot don't stay a part of the organization.

Can you tell if you have a holographic company? Yes. Just ask your employees a few questions. We're a location magazine, so we like the location question offered above, but other topics will suffice.

If you like the answers you get, congratulations, you have the beginnings of a holographic company.