From a Politico Europe story:
When Ann Mettler started work as a top policy adviser to the European Commission president, one of the first things she said to colleagues had echoes of Ronald Reagan’s famous words to Mikhail Gorbachev: “Tear down these walls.”
Mettler was referring to the office layout on the 12th floor of the Berlaymont, where she took over as head of the Commission’s in-house think tank, the European Political Strategy Centre, last December. She might have been talking about the way that thinking is done in the EU’s executive body.
“Everyone sat in their own offices with the doors closed,” Mettler said in an interview. “That’s not how you work a think tank. A lot of think-tanking is tearing down intellectual walls and opening minds to new ideas.”
Her staff now sits in a communal office space.
Among other things, the article goes on to note that Ms. Mettler came to the European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC) from the Lisbon Council, a think tank she co-founded in 2003 with her husband Paul Hofheinz.
