We were all sitting around the dinner table in Moscow, trying to top each other's stories. "My plane was already three hours late, so I left a message for the guy who was going to fly over from London to meet me in Munich that he shouldn't come. So I felt pretty comfortable: my next appointment was an hour later. Then when I got to my hotel ready to take a shower, I get this cheery message: 'We checked the flight times and it wasn't so late. We're waiting for you in the lobby!'
"Well, I flew overnight into Milan, took a taxi into the city, met the guy, went back to the airport to go to Zurich."
I heard there was a hurricane in New York, so I didn't go home. I simply stayed in Moscow for the weekend, had a useful day in Stockholm and began my next European trip from there.
But why? Were we some bunch of troglodytes who had never heard of email or video conferencing? Did we have some inside information about a coming shortage of airmiles?
Not at all. In fact, I used email very effectively to set up a string of last-minute meetings in Stockholm.
But there's something about face-to-face that matters. At that very dinner, for example, we got into business planning for a venture that we had been emailing about for the last month, and got away from the nitty-gritty of "please call Alice" to a more fruitful discussion of why to call Alice, from setting up meet ings to financial strategy. We got a sense of the CEO's confidence about the business and his concern about finding people to run it; we thought of leads we wouldn't have dreamed of when replying to an email. We let our minds wander around the topic at hand instead of away from it.
When Juan finally calls on Alice, after the overnight trip, smelling slightly of the baby that chewed on his collar and kept him awake overnight, it means something. Alice is likely to give him her full attention. She's not likely to be filing her nails, as she might do when she talks on the telephone. She knows how far and uncomfortably Juan has travelled, and she gets the message that she and her business are important to him. For his part, Juan gets a sense of whether she's serious about doing business, and the objections he must counter.
Computers can automate routine transactions and email can transmit routine information, but face-to-face is still what adds value: the new ideas, the motivation, the decision to take a risk on a new vendor or a new product or a new idea.
Now interestingly, one thing that makes travel so unpleasant these days is all the leisure travellers , crowding the airways as they go on vacation, visit aging relatives or cheer on newlyweds. Haven't they heard of virtual reality? Can't they just sit at home and buy things from strange lands over the net? What gives?
Yes, we will use technology more and more to make our lives richer and more efficient, even in our non-business lives, for everything from picking a school to picking a jumper, from setting up a soccer game to planning a vacation. But at the end of most of these semi-automated transactions is something non-virtual - a child's experiences in class, a fuzzy sweater, a roll in the mud, all the serendipities of a vacation. As more of life gets automated away or rendered artificial, the more we will value the real - the chance encounter with a stranger, the live animals of another continent, a foreign city's streets at dusk, and yes, even those tales of near-disaster that are so much fun to recount afterwards.
The challenge for businesses is how to foster unique and genuinely spontaneous experiences in a scalable, semi-predictable way.
As long as we're still made of wet chemicals, not sand and metal, we will still have some ineffable bond with the real world, and with other beings of wet chemicals. The electronics are to arrange things, to follow up with information, but not to replace the real experiences.
For users and for businesses, this means that technology does not replace the real world, it supplements it. E-commerce creates demand for better physical logistics systems; telecommunications mean it's easier to follow up on remote contacts, and to recover the investment of time and money in travel or conferences. I can travel more because it's easier to keep in touch with my office from afar.
At conferences, including the two I run myself, we make a point of providing experiences that could not be replicated in a streaming video presentation over the net, let alone a video or recording. People ask questions and contribute as well as listen. And we ask them questions: there's nothing like the chance you might be called on to keep your attention!
When you visit someone in their own space, you get a chance to understand what motivates them. You might even get a chance to meet their two-year-old daughter, as I did last week in Munich. When Sarah goes into a pub in 15 years, her proud daddy explained, she won't need to write into her device, she'll just wave it at a friend to trade data. More likely in five years, I figure, at a children's party. But just think: The social element will still be there. She'll be out and about, meeting other kids in the flesh, and then following up later with the newest in chat technology.
Indeed, that's what we were doing over dinner. The email contacts didn't click until the dinner. But we wouldn't be able to follow up without the email.
