by Jim Ware
April 6, 2009 at 5:52 pm
· Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Communities, Distributed Work, Management, Work Design, social networks
The answer: good things.
I’m just back from a conference in Vancouver, BC, where Jon Husband just happens to live. I was smart/lucky enough to have announced publicly that Charlie Grantham and I would be in Vancouver for a few days, and Jon was gracious enough to get in touch and suggest we meet (since we never had).
The three of us ended up having breakfast together last Friday, and then Jon was the perfect host, offering us a ride out the airport for our trips home.
Of course, Jon being the champion of Vancouver that he is, the ride took a little extra time (which we had plenty of) as he gave us a mini-tour of the downtown and surrounding area.
I had been in Vancouver before, but not for over 20 years, so it was an eye-opening tour. I’ve always had good feelings about the city (stemming from a wonderful summer in the mid-80’s characterized by many late evening dinners down near the harbor).
But even more important than enjoying Vancouver was enjoying getting to know Jon. We (including Charlie) discovered way more in common than any three older gray-haired guys who had never met before have any right to expect. As Jon described on his own blog last week (“Back to the Future . . . of Work“), we share many intellectual curiosities and probably even more views and values about organization, work, people, and even politics.
So here’s to the value of face to face meetings. In spite of our mutual fascination with what Jon calls “wirearchy,” we also agree wholeheartedly in getting together physically to share a real space, not just a virtual one.
Of course, that f2f meeting never would have taken place without the AppGap blog and our e-newsletter (where I’d announced the Vancouver trip in the first place), so I guess we owe some thanks to Hylton Joliffe and the folks at Intuit too for originally making Jon and me aware of each other.
But the nice part of now having “pressed the flesh” is that I’ll have a whole lot more context from now on as I read Jon’s blog comments. And I suspect we’ll see each other again in the not-too-distant future.
Thanks, Jon, for your hospitality and for your always-stimulating questions about the future of work and of management.
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You’re welcome, of course. It was a pleasure.
I agree with this sediment. I have been involved for some time in creating a physical meeting place for entrepreneurs and business minded individuals. Much of my inspiration came from reading an article in The Economist on the historical coffee-house culture.
I think that we will see plenty of social media MeetUp meetings in the future.
Jim, Thanks for sharing your reflection on meeting Jon live.
Your post reminded me of my first encounter with the power of blogging to build relationships at a small 2004 conference. There were perhaps 50 people in the room, including a subset of perhaps 10 participants who were pioneering bloggers including Stowe Boyd, Stuart Henshall and Judith Meskill. While this was the first time these bloggers had met face-to-face their bonds, and strength of consistent voice in the room, made clear the power of online exchanges to build relationships.
I haven’t yet met live anyone I only know through Twitter but I’m guessing the same phenomenom applies. Does it?
Jim Ware wrote @ April 8th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Jenny, you raise a good point, and another theme in this new interconnected world we now live in. I’m a strong believer in the value of f2f meetings – they enrich our relationships at the moment, and they leave a lasting change even if most of our future interaction is electronic. But what you’ve highlighted is the impact on a first f2f meeting of having already gotten to know people via blogs and emails. I certainly had a different feeling about meeting Jon last week than I would have if I had never read any of his posts or knew nothing about him.
And regarding Twitter, I find that a bit harder way to get really well-acquainted with someone. Most twittering that I know about seems to be fairly one-way. That is, I follow a number of interesting people (many of them active bloggers and writers in other media as well), so while I know something about them and their interests, most of them don’t know me from Adam. Sure, some twitter relationships are two-way but in my experience at least many are not.
Good point about Twitter. It will be interesting to see how Twitter relationship development evolves over time. Yesterday I checked out Tweetbraion after finding Patti Anklams’ Tweet pointing to it: http://www.tweetbrain.com
I don’t know if you caught Sandy Pentland’s HBR Breakthrough Idea for 2009 titled “How Social Networks Work Best” http://snurl.com/fk545 He cites a recent MIT research finding that:
“in one organization the employees with the most extensive personal digital networks were 7% more productive than their colleagues– so Wikis and Web 2.0 tools may indeed imporove prodicutivity. In the same organization, however, the employees with the most cohesive face-to-face networks were 30% more productive.”
The HBR nugget concludes:
“Electronic tools may well be suited to information discovery, face-to-face communications, an oft-negelected part of the management process, best supports information integration- as bees already know.”
It’s interesting to consider this finding in the context of how to best maximizie enteprise productivity in this world of economic challenges and slashed travel budgets.
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