All of us are use to face-to-face meetings.  We have always believed that they are essential.  Now, a year into the pandemic, I wonder what we think now?  An interesting Op-Ed in today’s NY Times.

“How many of those trips would have been unnecessary if I’d only Zoomed?  My estimate runs somewhere between most and all. Aviation is a modern miracle; it is also expensive, annoying and environmentally costly. Now that videoconferencing has been shown to be an acceptable way to get work done, there’s no reason to quit it when the virus is gone.  For years, it has been a truism that face-to-face meetings are far better than videoconferencing, for obvious reasons. They foster deeper relationships and perhaps better group decision-making.  “I grew up in a sales culture that said, ‘You want to close a deal, you go get in front of the client,’” said Darren Marble, an entrepreneur based in Los Angeles who used to travel to New York every other week. When the pandemic hit, he didn’t know how he’d do business. “Working at home was antagonistic to everything I’d learned over my career,” he said.  But in the Zoom era, everything worked out. In fact, Marble told me, 2020 was a “breakout year”; his firm, Crush Capital, recently raised more than $3 million from over 30 investors, all through Zoom. “Rapport is overrated,” Marble said.”

To read the full article, click here.