When was your last "ah-ha!" moment?

By
Lanny Goodman
on May 30, 2008 9:40 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
When was the last time you had an "ah-ha!" moment?

Seems as though they come in two versions.  The first version is when your worldview shifts.  These ah-has are usually permanent.  Once things have shifted, they don't ever go back.  Discovering complexity theory was that for me, the notion that all systems have a natural tendency to self-organize.  Head slappers.

The other type is more ephemeral and usually an observation or insight on ourselves or our organizations.  These are at least as if not more important but have a tendency to slip away quickly.  If you've ever flown on a day with low overcast skies and as the plane takes off, at some point gets above the cloud deck into astonishing sunlight.  Sooner or later, however the plane begins its decent back into the murk.  So it is with these moments of insight.

How to somehow insure that these insights are not lost?  

1) Write them down.
2) Act on them.  Now.

That's what you can do in my experience.

I had one today.  And I'm acting on it by writing this blog.

The insight was this: The output of my work is not nearly as creative as the output of my brain.  

Anyone else ever share this reality?  (Raise your hand.) 

There is a reason for this, actually, but it is a problem that is amenable to process improvement.  Here's the issue:

Accomplishing anything involves two design problems:  the first is the design of what you would like to create.  The second design problem is how to execute the results of the first design problem.  What normally happens is one of two things:

1. We start trying to figure out the second design problem concurrent with the first design problem.  This turns the whole exercise into a fur ball and typically fatally compromises both the quality of the vision and the quality of execution.

2. We get so bogged down in the details of execution that the execution is late or never gets done at all and as a result we don't innovate at anything like the pace either of which we are conceptually capable or that we need to to maximize mining of our markets.

Solutions:

1. Never worry about execution during the creative design phase.

2. Build the organizational infrastructure for execution.  Hire an assistant, hire a project manager, contract with an agency, bring in a temp, set up an office space, put up a big bulletin board, do whatever you need to do to capture those ideas and get them executed quickly.

3. Engrave the following mantra in your brain: "The Key to Innovation is Miniaturization."  Execute all your ideas on a small scale.  They will execute much more quickly, you won't got bogged down with budget discussions, accountants and lawyers won't get involved (and no one can shut down execution faster than lawyers and accountants) and if the idea turns out to be a dud, so what?  The cost was relatively trivial.  If it actually works, then put more resources behind it and push.  Your worst enemy is your own organization.  

It's worth remembering that the fundamental imperative behind every organization is to make sure that absolutely nothing new ever happens.  To get something new happening you have to push people out of their comfort zones, or (if you're smart) pull people out of their comfort zones.  Bring a wild new idea to the table and everyone's brakes lock.  Bring a proven concept to the table and people will at least listen and chances are someone will get excited and pick up the ball and start to run.

Now I've got to go figure out how to apply this wisdom to my own life and business!

Is Your Business Making You Values Blind?

By
Lanny Goodman
on May 4, 2008 1:08 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
I was having a conversation with a client the other day and we got to talking about one of the more insidious risks in business, creeping values blindness.  

The classic example is the tobacco industry.  One hundred years ago, tobacco was an honorable business to be in.  But as it grew and became a very valuable (financially) institution, and knowledge of the deleterious effects of tobacco became known, its members found themselves unable to make appropriate value judgments, such as saying, "We really should get out of this business because it's killing people."  Instead (as further discovery revealed) they began figuring out how to target women and children, develop additives that made cigarettes more addictive and generally compounded the felony of remaining in that business.  The ultimate expression of this was the spectacle of the nine CEOs of the largest tobacco companies on national television lying to Congress about their knowledge and activities.

As our knowledge and understanding evolve, we have to be very careful that our business doesn't stunt our growth.  The case for global warming is another example.  The only major country in which there is any serious debate about global warming is the US.  Why?  Because of a very carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign by the oil companies.  (For extensive documentation of this just Google "global warming disinformation".)  Given the potential impacts of climate change, how can the people involved justify these kinds of actions which by any standard of measure are immoral?  

In my writing on self-management, I've made the case that people's behavior is a product of the ecosystem in which they work.  It's not difficult to see how people get locked into a system where there is way too much peer pressure for individuals who have qualms to be able to change the system.  The system has way too much inertia to allow for a voice of sanity to be heard.  Meanwhile, the participants in the system are stuck in a moral dead end.  The knowledge of the inappropriateness of what they are doing is there, but they are unable to respond so they have no choice but to resolve this cognitive dissonance by conjuring up some justification for their behavior.  Taken to its extreme, this can have serious legal implications (e.g. tobacco).  For the entrepreneur, the issue is more one of developing a case of values blindness which stunts our spiritual growth.

Our understanding of what is healthy and in alignment with nature is growing by leaps and bounds.  Is your business built around an obsolete model?  If your business has to do with food, large energy consumption, large percentage of cost or value in throw-away packaging, or is of little intrinsic value (e.g. impulse purchases), this would be a good time to think long and hard about how to transform your business.

Would there be a cost?  Sure.  Would there be dislocation?  Sure.  But think of it this way, someone out there without the liability of the organizational and market inertia you have is laying awake at night trying to figure out how to displace you with products and services that make yours either irrelevant or unappealing to generations of consumers who are looking at what they buy in very different ways than has historically been the case.  

Ultimately the issue is that in times of great change, the status quo is the most dangerous strategy.  Not only does it bring a significant business risk, but values blindness is a significant personal risk as well. 

The Five Most Dangerous Words in Business

By
Lanny Goodman
on April 21, 2008 4:30 PM | | Comments (0)
The great anthropologist Edward T Hall said in his classic book The Silent Language, culture is largely invisible to its participants.  Culture, of course can be defined as those assumptions and beliefs about the nature of reality that never get questioned.  There has been much said and written about corporate cultures over the years and a quick search on amazon for "the culture of business" brings up many books on doing business in other countries.  But what assumptions do we make in how we organize, compensate, provide feedback, educate and orient our employees?  There are many assumptions and beliefs that never get scrutinized.  

And they cause big trouble.

Let's be honest, American businesses (and probably all businesses) are filled with all kinds of dysfunctions that create stress, inefficiencies, loss of productivity, waste, and stunt the development of the talent for which we pay so dearly.  The assumption that is the most deadly to business today can be summarized in the five most dangerous words in business:

That's just how it is.

It's almost if instead of the ten commandments, Moses came down the mountain with the blueprint for the modern organization.  An act of God determines how we do things and the dysfunctions we deal with, well, that's just how it is.

Except it isn't.

Organization design, management practices and processes are human artifacts, not holy relics.  They are the product of human design processes.  And anything humans design, humans can redesign.

How is it that we have fallen into the trap of assuming that when things go wrong that someone must be responsible?  Why is it that when there is a lack of trust among employees (or worse, leaders) that the people are the problem?  The facts are:

1) The people are uncaring, negligent, incompetent, and indifferent or
2) The people are caring, attentive, competent and committed, but are responding to the pressures and rewards of the ecosystem in which they work and to which they pay very close attention, and the dysfunctional behavior is symptomatic of the system in which they work.

What other options are there?

If you believe your people are caring and committed, then the only place to look is the system.

As Sherlock Holmes once said, "When all other alternatives are eliminated, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

We do not have the luxury of putting up with the wasted efforts of people working at cross purposes in our companies.  We have to reinvent business around a different model.  We need to study the culture of business and realize the trap we've fallen into is that we have gotten so used to our organizational dysfunctions we assume that, "That's just how it is."

The good news is that nature is showing us the way.  More on this over the next few weeks.  

Meanwhile, the next time you let out a sign of exasperation about the dysfunctions in your organization and hear those five most dangerous words wander through your mind, I hope all your alarms go off.  The right response is, "We created this mess, and by God we can fix it." 

Technorati

By
Lanny Goodman
on April 8, 2008 11:40 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Technorati Profile

Technology and Strategy

By
Lanny Goodman
on April 8, 2008 9:51 AM | | Comments (0)
I did an interview yesterday for a podcast on webteks.com that will be up in a week or two but the subject was important enough that it deserves some comment and that is the relationship between technology and strategy.  

This is a huge subject but the critical point here is that one can no longer think about business strategy without technology being integral to both the vision of where a company should go and the strategy of how to get it there.  Technology is now inseparable from both vision and strategy.  

An example:  Anyone who has been to Bentonville, Arkansas has seen the windowless concrete cube that must be seven stories on a side.  That is Wal*Mart's data center although data bunker might be a more apt description.  If you are a vendor and subscribe to their service, you can watch your products going over the scanners in every store in their system in real time.  Could Wal*Mart exist without technology?  How could mere human beings keep track of $300+ billion worth of goods and the payroll details of over a million employees without technology?  Not remotely possible.

Marketing (webinars, email campaigns, social networking), administration (workflow, document management), sales (CRM, videoconferencing), operations (GPS, ERP, RFID), finance (accounting, electronic banking, EDI), HR (online recruiting, learning management, human resources information systems, intranets), purchasing (extranets, EDI) are just a few of the ways that technology is infiltrating and transforming everything we do in business.

But here's the challenge.  Most of the leaders of our companies can remember a time when they didn't have a PC on their desk.  Many grew up at time when typing was something secretaries did, certainly not executives.  The personal computer was something that got bolted on to their lives and careers, not built in.  In many cases they don't have an intuitive grasp of technology.  It's worth remembering that many of the younger entrepreneurs among us (and perhaps your competitors) cannot remember a time when there wasn't a PC in the house.

Another reality is that technology is a tool.  Some people get tools and some don't.  It is some kind of brain thing.  You can watch someone who gets tools pick up any tool and just see how they are processing its capabilities and applications just by studying it's form.  No judgement implied here.  In his ground-breaking book Frames of Mind, Harvard professor and MacArthur Fellow Howard Gardner postulated at least six types of intelligence.  So lack of instinct for tools only means that other types of intelligence are likely to be present.  However, in a technological world, the ability to grasp the strategic importance and potential applications of technology cannot be overstated.  

It is critical that business leaders do a rigorous self-assessment.  If technology is not your strong suit, then you must find people to team with who really get both technology and business.  If you have internal IT people, in too many cases they will not be strong business or strategic thinkers.  Even if you do have strategic level people who get technology, it will behoove you to team up with an outside firm that is relatively product agnostic to offer a second opinion.  Technology is like anything else, people have their tastes, biases and experience that shapes their opinions, not always objectively.

If you do have an interest in and aptitude for technology, as a business leader, you need to:

  1. Stay current with the technology press.  Subscribe to E-Week, Information Week or InfoWorld.  They are likely to seem more geeky than might be desirable, but it will give you a feel for what is going on.  You will also get a very visceral feel for how fast it's all moving.
  2. When going to your trade association or other conferences, seek out the technology workshops and vendors and grill them for what the bleeding edge people are doing.  You may not want to be taking on bleeding edge projects until the technology has proved itself, but you need to know where people are pushing the envelope.
  3. Pay attention to technology in the popular press.  It is difficult to know how Web 2.0 will wind up affecting business (and if you don't know what Web 2.0 is then you've got some homework to do) but when you consider that MySpace gets more clicks per day than Google, that there are multiplayer role playing games out there with 110 million members worldwide, these are numbers way to big to ignore.  
Every leader's job is to be constantly enriching the tapestry that is his/her worldview.  We can't always know the implication of any individual thread in that tapestry.  But with things changing as fast as they are in today's world, the risk of winding up in an evolutionary dead end is just too great not to be pulling in information from every dimension of life. 

Technology is a challenge conceptually, culturally and economically.  Management luminary Peter Drucker once chastised business for being too dependent on computers.  What even he failed to grasp is the real power of computer technology is that technology creates the ability to do things that cannot be done any other way.  This is the real power of technology.  Ironically, it is the people in the system who are slowing down the process.  Technology is fundamentally changing the game.  Humans as a whole just can't wrap our brains around and adapt to change as fast as technology is capable of creating new opportunities.   

Therein lies both the challenge and opportunity for business leaders.

Words of Wisdom

By
Lanny Goodman
on April 7, 2008 7:50 PM | | Comments (0)
If you're not familiar with the name John W. Gardner click on the link to get a run down on his remarkable career.  In 1990, he published the best book on leadership I have run across in my career, appropriately entitled On Leadership.  I read it years ago and had reason to pull it off the shelf the other day to find a quote that I had remembered that I wanted to pass on to a client.  I think the quote is worth passing on to my readers as well:


To exercise leadership today, leaders must institutionalize their leadership.  The issues are too technical and the pace of change too swift to expect that a leader, no matter how gifted, will be able to solve personally the major problems facing the system over which he or she presides.  So we design an institutional system--a government agency, a corporation--to solve the problems, and then we select a leader who has the capacity to preside over and strengthen the system.  Some leaders may be quite gifted in solving problems personally, but if they fail to institutionalize the process, their departure leaves the system crippled.  They must create or strengthen systems that will survive them. 

John W. Gardner
from, On Leadership  


The Workload Paradox

By
Lanny Goodman
on April 2, 2008 9:46 PM | | Comments (0)
Productivity is at the heart of business.  We measure it at a macroeconomic level. Managers worry about it.  Employees are often measured on it.  Most people work at or near the practical maximum production capacity (Figure One).  This is not to say that their activities are necessarily effective, but people tend to stay busy.  productivity1.jpg

Most people would agree, their lives (work and personal) tend to hover around their maximum capacity, sometimes in overload, sometimes a bit less than their maximum.

On the surface, this looks like the optimum scenario, the content of what we are doing notwithstanding which I'll touch on in a bit.

It appears we are making the most efficient use of our time and talents. But, as usual, there is a fly in the ointment.

Figure Two shows us the fly.

productivity2.jpg
As soon as we are confronted with any change, any surge in workload we immediately go into overload.  I think everyone would agree that overload is not our best gig.  Tempers get short, stress increases, work hours cut into family time, sleep deprivation starts to impact our effectiveness.

Granted, there are those who would say they do their best work under pressure.  I'm one of them actually and there is some basis of truth to this.  However, over the long haul, the cost in physical, emotional, relational well being, clarity of thought and action belies the notion that this is a desirable scenario in any way.  

The quality disciplines for example demonstrate conclusively that it is the consistency of throughput that yields the highest quality work and that spikes and slack times undercut quality.
productivity3.jpg

This brings us to the workload paradox. 

What if we throttled our activities back to something that looked like Figure Three?

Well, the first complaint is that we're not being as efficient as possible.  At one level, clearly this is true.  But let's look at it from another point of view.  What production manager ever born does his/her production planning based on the assumption of 100% uptime of production machinery?  

None.

Murphy lurks on every factory floor.  Machines break, machines require preventative maintenance.  Smart 
productivity4.jpg
production people conduct predictive maintenance.  All this downtime has to be factored into any and all production expectations.  

Why do we consider this principles not applicable to human beings (ourselves as well as our employees)?  Imagine the overload scenario in Figure Two taking place in the context of the workload of Figure Three.  The result is shown in Figure Four.  

In this scenario, we have surge capacity.  We can assimilate changes in our world.  We can deal calmly and effectively with crises.  

Here's the real kicker.  

"I really should train Bob/Sue to take this responsibility off my plate but I'm just too busy to take the time.  It's quicker to just do it myself."

Anyone out there in blog land ever had that conversation with themselves?  It's OK.  We've all done it.  This is called being trapped and it is a byproduct of working at your maximum practical capacity.  If you don't have time to leverage yourself, you're trapped.  If you don't have time to work yourself out of a job, you're trapped.  Whether you're an employee or the CEO it doesn't matter, you're still trapped.  Ironically, trapped in a prison of your own making.

As a leader of a company, division, or workgroup or even just yourself, getting out of this trap requires voluntarily driving yourself into overload for some period of time.  You have to do more before you can do less.  What are the steps?

1) Identify the least strategic, important, or skilled activities you spend your time doing.
2) Identify who you can offload them to.  If you don't have anyone to offload them to, ask yourself the question, "What would happen if I just didn't do them?"  You'll be surprised at how often nothing of importance would happen if you just quit doing some of the activities you do routinely.  
3) Be prepared to defend your lower level of activity.  You will be bucking the trend of the people around you (and above you).  
4) Demonstrate the value of your new level of productivity by taking on new, more important activities or assignments, being sure to push an equivalent amount of your least important work down to others.

The results will be that you will do less and accomplish more.  You will be clearer minded.  You will be better rested.  Your family will be happier.  Your employees will grow and progress faster which will attract the best talent in your organization.  You will be doing increasingly more strategic and important work which will be rewarding to your career, be you entrepreneur or employee.  You will be having more fun and be happier.  Others will enjoy your company more.  In other words, you will have created a self-reinforcing updraft.

Will you be less efficient?  Yes.  Will you be more effective?  Also yes.  

In one of his early books, Peter Drucker, the great management thinking and writer once said (and I'm paraphrasing), efficiency isn't necessary to create success, it's necessary to sustain it.  To create success we have to be effective.  He characterized the difference between the two by saying efficiency is doing things right.  Effectiveness is doing the right things.

Doing the right things is the key to resetting your workload to a lower but more effective level.    

Don't Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions

By
Lanny Goodman
on April 1, 2008 3:15 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
How many times have we heard this fundamental axiom of management?

Here's an alternative approach:

1. Give me a heads up about the problem so i can be thinking about it.
2. Bring some possible suggestions for solutions.  You probably won't have all the data so don't get too attached to any one solution.
3. I'll come up with some ideas, but I probably won't have all the data either so
4. Let's meet and share our ideas and craft a solution together which is much more likely to be more powerful and effective than anything either of us could have come up with alone.

There are two principles at work in this suggestion.

1. One of the fundamental principles of the quality disciplines is that all employees work in a system that they don't own and don't control.  The employees are intimately familiar with the limitations of that system but they are largely powerless to effect any changes.  Managers, who have the authority to change the system, don't work in it and therefore have little visibility into the problems or any visceral sense of the cost or impact of the problems.  It is only through the collaboration of managers and employees that process improvement can take place.  Managers must acknowledge that employees have the information and then work with employees to make the process and systemic changes that produce real improvement.

2. In their excellent and classic little book Getting To Yes Roger Fisher and William Ury show elegantly how two minds together are far more likely to create a more creative outcome than either mind alone, no matter how talented.  By coming together with ideas rather than solutions, a collaborative dynamic is created which will be much more likely to lead to a mutually satisfying outcome.  As soon as one party brings a "solution", a very different dynamic is created in which the manager is much more likely to take a black and white position in response, which often is "That won't work."  End of conversation.  Employee is demotivated, problem is likely to persist.  

Discuss this shift in approach at your next staff meeting.  See what happens.


The Fallacy of Leading by Example

By
Lanny Goodman
on March 14, 2008 10:56 PM | | Comments (0)
Ask a room full of CEOs if they believe in the principle of "leading by example" and almost every hand will go up.

This is a terrible way to lead.

Let me explain.  Leading by example would be great if the CEO's job was the same as everyone else's.  But it's not.

To illustrate the point, in my speeches to CEOs, I commonly pose the following question: "Let's say you were to write down everything you do at work hour by hour over a two week period. At the end of that period were you to go through that list applying the following two criteria,
  • I am the only person in the company for whom it is legally, morally, or ethically appropriate to do this task
  • I am the only person in the company who is qualified to do this task,
what percentage of the items on the list would meet these criteria."

The responses average out to about 10%.

Think for a moment about the implications of this number.  First, it means there is a potential 900% increase in your production capacity as CEO doing the work that only the CEO can do sitting on the table.  This is huge.  It's almost an order of magnitude.  If you were to apply even half that capacity to moving your business forward strategically, would it transform you business?  If you were to apply the other half to your family and personal pursuits would it transform your life?

I doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the answer to both questions is a resounding "yes".  

But no, most CEOs are too busy doing things that other people could and should be doing to transform either.  Why?  Among other things, the legacy of lead by example.  

We are taught as we come up in business that if we aren't being busy, busy, busy, our employees will get the message that it's OK to slack off.  Actually, like most myths, there is some truth to this.  Leaders live in a fishbowl.  However, there are a number of assumptions embedded in this belief system which need to be scrutinized on order to validate it's truthfulness.  

The most important assumption is the unstated "Absent any other systems of feedback, compensation, communication, and organization designed to align employee self-interest and organizational interests..." then lead by example is about all you have left.  Let's say, for a moment that you did have some of those things.  Let's say you have open books, a robust profit sharing plan, an internal customer feedback system, and active process improvement program in place.  If you did, employees wouldn't need a CEO shooting around like an unguided missile in order to feel like they needed to stay busy and productive.  In fact, all the above are far more effective aligners of employee interest than making them feel like they have to keep up the pace set by the CEO.

This brings us back to the point that the CEOs job is different than everyone else's.  I've often posed the question to CEOs, "When was the last time you walked into your office, put your feet up on your desk and spent two hours with your nose in a good business book?"  The usual answer is a blank look like I'm speaking in tongues.  

The traditional model of leading by example not only robs the leader of time to enrich his/her life and family relationships, robs the business of the strategic momentum the leader could and should be bringing, but it stunts the growth of every employee who should be doing the tasks the CEO is doing.  This robs the organization of leverage now, and the experience the employee does not gain will cost the organization lost dividends and opportunities for all time. 

Max Depree, former chairman of Herman Miller, wrote a wonderful little book called, Leadership is an Art.  He starts his story by saying "The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.  The last is to say thank you." 

Who else but the CEO is empowered to define reality?  Is the assistant mail room clerk going to come into your office with a detailed strategic vision for the company for the next ten years?  Is this something you can slap together between a staff meeting with marketing, returning six phone calls, answering 32 emails and your meeting with the bank in ten minutes?

No.  Defining reality takes time, it takes thought.  It takes a steady stream of information about how the world is changing around you.  What are the implications of social media on your business?  Myspace gets more daily traffic now than Google.  There are online multiplayer games with 110 million members worldwide.  This may be relevant to your business or it may not, but it is data you can't ignore if you expect to have a handle on the business landscape.  Do you understand where technology is headed, do you have a feel for what's happing in education and training, do you understand how marketing and advertising are being transformed by Web 2.0?  These are just a few of the broadest examples of fundamental sea changes that are happening in the business ecosystem as we speak.  It's virtually a given there are equivalent changes afoot in your industry and marketplace.  If that isn't enough, the very fundamentals of leadership and management as we have known it are undergoing profound change.    

The CEO's job is to be the over-the-horizon radar for the company, to be looking for strategic opportunities, making sure your people, organization and resource base are ready to adapt quickly to changes in the economy, the marketplace, your industry.  The great English banker Baron Rothschild once said, "The time to invest is when blood is running in the streets."  When the world is changing as fast as ours, it is running in the streets somewhere.  Those streets may be yours.  Right now, entire new industries are hatching, others are on the downslope to oblivion.  If you are staying busy, busy, busy doing things that other people could and should be doing, your corner of the forest may be on fire and you may not even realize it, buried in the trees as you likely are.

If you have built an effective organization, your employees will want you to be reading, meeting with industry experts, going to conferences, gazing into your crystal ball, getting educated, exploring new technologies.  Their ability to make their house payments depends on it.  It will take some time to bring your people up to speed so you can offload your non-essential responsibilities on to them.  It will take some communication with and explanation to help your employees understand this shift in your behavior.  Once they understand, the odds are excellent that they will be enthusiastically supportive, particularly if you keep them informed about what you are seeing and learning.  You'll have lots of material for your blog on your company intranet.  Don't have an intranet yet?  Don't have a blog yet?  

I rest my case.

The End of Business Travel

By
Lanny Goodman
on March 9, 2008 7:00 AM | | Comments (0)
Why is it that every day, hundreds of thousands of business people strip down, pile all their belongings into gray plastic trays, trudge through airport security, climb on to absurdly cramped aircraft (with questionable maintenance as we read in the news this week), have their biological clocks confused, expose themselves to God only knows what kinds of infectious diseases and deep vein thrombosis (which American Airlines thoughtfully explains in the back of their inflight magazine), spend increasingly astonishing amounts of money to stay in the uninspiring surroundings of chain hotels, rent unfamiliar cars, turn around and do it all again, finally crawling into their own beds at some ungodly hour after three hour flight delays and missed connections when they could have walked a few feet down to the videoconference center and conducted their meeting electronically in about a tenth of the time and at virtually zero cost?

I've been around long enough to remember when air travel was a big deal.  People dressed up for the occasion.  The airlines actually tried to serve decent food.  It was a bit exotic, romantic, an adventure.

Today, between the airlines' conviction that unless the passengers suffer broken legs they haven't found the limit of the number of passengers they can cram into a plane, the TSA who strips us down and x-rays everything we own to convince us that flying is actually safe (in spite of failing to catch 75% of the government's tests simulating smuggling contraband onto airplanes) bad or no food at all, air travel is about as appealing as riding Greyhound.  And at Greyhound you don't have to deal with the TSA.

I took my stepdaughter and granddaughter and wife to New York last fall to visit my oldest daughter Jenessa and her new baby.  I've been going to New York since I was a child.  The hotels that I normally stayed were now at least $450 a night.  The Marriott Marquise on Times Square where I've stayed many times...$750.  We're talking Marriott here, not the Four Seasons.  I was astonished.

I have literally millions of air miles under my belt.  It is generally a misery.  

Not very many years ago, videoconferencing was very exotic technology.  Then, it became more affordable, but still required ISDN lines to work properly.  An ISDN line is basically two POTS (plain old telephone service) lines multiplexed together.  To get 30 frame per second, full motion video, you need three ISDNs (384K of bandwidth).  They are relatively expensive, tend to be fussy to get installed right and maintain, and when you are using them, you are making the equivalent of six concurrent long distance phone calls.  

You couldn't use internet protocol (IP) because the IP isn't a real time process.  Half your data packets could be getting routed through Oshkosh and the other half through Stockholm. When they all train up and run down to your email box, the difference in timing doesn't matter.  For video and audio, the latency or timing is critical.  A few years ago, however, the internet backbone adopted QOS (quality of service), a technology that flags and prioritizes traffic.  Video gets top priority, voice second and data third.  This has made IP videoconferencing viable.  Now, you have only the cost of your broadband service (which you are paying for anyway) and the cost of the equipment.  

Cisco Systems is using the term telepresence now to describe the systems they are selling (http://cisco.com/en/US/products/ps7060/index.html).  Life size, high definition is pretty amazing, but still relatively expensive.  However, high def is increasingly coming into the cost range that almost any business can afford.  Take a look at www.lifesize.com.  The Cisco setups cost about $375,000 per station and need a T-3 circuit to handle the bandwidth.  A bit out of reach for most.  Polycom is the market leader in videoconferencing (www.polycom.com) and you can put in a station for about $6,000, and much less if you want to use your computer monitor.  

By the way, when I talk about videoconferencing, I'm not talking about a Logictec web cam clamped onto your monitor and a two inch square jerky picture on your screen.  A good video conference setup allows you to control the camera at both ends.  You should be able to pan and zoom, preset shots if you are covering a large meeting room at the other end, and set the camera to follow voices if you want.  

I can tell you this. I put videoconferencing in six or seven years ago and spent six hours in my first video meeting with a client in California.  When the meeting was over, I sat there stunned realizing that I didn't have to dash to the airport, turn in the rental car, wait for an hour plus (assuming the flight was on time) suffer the indignities of security and get home at one in the morning.  I walked over to my desk and got almost an additional full day's work done.

So why isn't everyone doing this?  An excellent question the answer to which eludes me.  It won't work for every type of business meeting.  It's not the same as being there.  It's about 85% though and I believe it would eliminate about 75% of business travel.  Let's face it, air travel is bad for the environment, it's hard on the people, it's incredibly expensive especially when you factor in the lost productivity and physical wear and tear.

I remember when fax machines were exotic.  When I was meeting with a client in Manhattan and they suggested we fax our lunch order down to the deli around the corner, I knew the fax revolution had arrived.  Once it hit critical mass, it just exploded.  Everybody had one.  Sooner or later the same has got to happen with video.  The economics are there.

If I ran a company with an outside sales force with national accounts, I would offer to give  my clients a videoconferencing setup if they would use it to meet with my reps (and whoever else they wanted to talk to).  It would pay for itself in a few months.

There is every reason to make videoconferencing as ubiquitous as fax, email or telephone.  It is technology whose time has come.  Make your people happy.  Keep them at home where they can eat home-cooked meals, drive their own cars, sleep in the own beds with their partners, and get more work done with less effort and sleep deprivation.  Bite the bullet.  Put a system in and experiment with it.  If you have two locations, it's a no-brainer.  If you don't, talk to a customer you travel to regularly and see if they would be willing to run the experiment with you.  When enough people realize the benefits, we'll get to critical mass.  

Then, mercifully, our trips to the airport will be fewer and farther between.  By the way, my video address is 63.253.185.66.  Give me a call.
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