James Burke does a great job of contrasting holistic and reductionist thinking. At a Microsoft offsite a few years ago he was a guest speaker, and talked about the importance of exposing yourself to different kinds of thinking and different specialization rather than being narrowly focused all of the time on specific tasks. Afterwards I ran into him by the elevator and asked whether he saw this as part of the value of Google's 20% time. He said yes, very much so, although he hadn't wanted to make a big deal of it for the Microsoft audience.

Of course he also points out that reductionist thinking has values despite it's limitations. "It did, after all, give us the scientific revolution." Indeed.