I met a friend recently for a coffee at the Charing Cross Hotel. It's a convenient place to meet and there is the option of extending coffee into lunch.
While the current management is pushing coffee drinkers into the bar and out of the previous space which is now reserved for the more lucrative meals, it's still acceptable. I do miss the old name of the Eleanor Bar.
While enjoying a cappuccino, I glanced around the other tables. A business meeting was going on at each one. Laptops were out, papers spread over the small tables, and conversations via mobile phones were in progress.
At a central London hotel, the clientele is likely to be business people, but was this going on at country hotels as well?
While a sign of the new, digital economy with freelancers, consultants, WiFi and data everywhere, I did wonder if this was ultimately good for business.
Since I did an undergraduate course in 18th Century literature (one of the best I ever took), I loved the idea of that period's Coffee Houses with the intellectual heavyweights coming together to argue about poetry, prose and drama, or to launch the insurance industry.
Somehow, these didn't look like great people, nor did what they were discussing seem to be particularly noteworthy. I can only guess, as I did not have my eavesdropping device with me, but I suspect it was pretty mundane stuff.
Still it was important to them, and more importantly, it was being done IRL. There is too little face-to-face communication and our technology discourages it. Yes, it enables one to do business over great distances, but it also is a corporate excuse to cut travel budgets and eliminate real human relationships from commercial life.
I retired never having met people I had spoken to on the telephone almost weekly for twenty years, and that was sad. You try to develop a personal contact by phone, ask about the wife and children, the golf handicap, or a sports score, but roving managers are quick to point out that the company telephones are not for personal calls - especially international ones.
So, I ask myself, which is the better way of doing business? The telephone, or the coffee house? And then I ask, so why did business in coffee houses die out?
I'm still working on that one.
While the current management is pushing coffee drinkers into the bar and out of the previous space which is now reserved for the more lucrative meals, it's still acceptable. I do miss the old name of the Eleanor Bar.
While enjoying a cappuccino, I glanced around the other tables. A business meeting was going on at each one. Laptops were out, papers spread over the small tables, and conversations via mobile phones were in progress.
At a central London hotel, the clientele is likely to be business people, but was this going on at country hotels as well?
While a sign of the new, digital economy with freelancers, consultants, WiFi and data everywhere, I did wonder if this was ultimately good for business.
Since I did an undergraduate course in 18th Century literature (one of the best I ever took), I loved the idea of that period's Coffee Houses with the intellectual heavyweights coming together to argue about poetry, prose and drama, or to launch the insurance industry.
Somehow, these didn't look like great people, nor did what they were discussing seem to be particularly noteworthy. I can only guess, as I did not have my eavesdropping device with me, but I suspect it was pretty mundane stuff.
Still it was important to them, and more importantly, it was being done IRL. There is too little face-to-face communication and our technology discourages it. Yes, it enables one to do business over great distances, but it also is a corporate excuse to cut travel budgets and eliminate real human relationships from commercial life.
I retired never having met people I had spoken to on the telephone almost weekly for twenty years, and that was sad. You try to develop a personal contact by phone, ask about the wife and children, the golf handicap, or a sports score, but roving managers are quick to point out that the company telephones are not for personal calls - especially international ones.
So, I ask myself, which is the better way of doing business? The telephone, or the coffee house? And then I ask, so why did business in coffee houses die out?
I'm still working on that one.
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