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Tech companies like to babble about openness and transparency. But try finding an engineer's phone number. Standard procedure is to hide company telephone and email directories from external eyeballs, lest a recruiter — or, more annoyingly, a reporter — use the phone list to cold-call staffers. One shining exception: IBM, the world's largest IT employer, with nearly 400,000 people on board in at least 90 countries. Why would the company publish its entire directory and risk attack from headhunters and snoops? Because in 2008 IBM doesn't sell servers, it leases brains. Customers don't want to submit a request to a faceless feedback form and hope the right person at the world's biggest, sprawlingest tech company sees it. I'm sure there was a fight over the decision. But they finally faced the truth: We already hunt their employees down on Blogger and LinkedIn.