That kind of efficiency adds up to huge profits, soaring stock prices and few complaints from investors. Or as Brooks C. Holtom, a professor of management at Georgetown, put it, “If your stock is doing well, your job is safe.”

The Shrinking Executive Suite

If the old quarters for G.E.’s top brass were akin to a pedestal, the new ones are more like a fishbowl. At G.E.’s interim headquarters in Boston, and in the permanent one set to open next year, the offices for top leaders have glass walls that enable them to see out and, in turn, let employees see in.

They are also much smaller. In Fairfield, a handful of senior G.E. leaders and their assistants occupied 44,000 square feet in the executive wing. Now the same group shares a total of just 7,800 square feet, less space than in the big mansions many C.E.O.s inhabit in places like Greenwich, Conn., or the Bay Area.

“It has a much more collaborative feel, and the glass replicates the transparency of working together,” said Ms. Klee, the G.E. executive. “The Fairfield campus was beautiful, but it lacked the spark you feel here. It’s a different time, and we like the power and energy and creativity that comes from mixing people together.”

Perhaps, but like the fallen statue of Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem, the old monuments to corporate power did possess a certain grandeur.

G.E.’s 66-acre Fairfield campus was purchased for $31.5 million last fall by Sacred Heart University, according to Michael J. Kinney, the school’s senior vice president for finance and administration.

“There’s not as big a need for corporate headquarters like this any more,” said Mr. Kinney, who as a Kraft executive once worked in a similarly spectacular setting in the Taj Mahal-like General Foods building in Rye Brook, N.Y. “Those were the days.”