Let's suppose your talking about an executive making 20 million a year who spends 2 days traveling for that lunch. 20,000,000 * 2 / 365 = 109,589$. Granted he can get some stuff done while traveling, but it's also far less than what he could do in the office and it will ofen take more than 2 days once you include jetlag etc. I have no problem saying that handshake could be worth 10k, but once the numbers start growing you start talking about someone’s full time salary for a year and I have trouble thinking that handshake is of that magnitude.
No, I am perfectly happy avoiding any company that requires face time to operate. Edit: I am not saying this just to be pithy; such negotiations have a huge upfront cost which requires a specific type of business structure to deal with and I have no interest in participating in those structures. (And yes I do have significant experience in this area, and yes I did decide to make less money to avoid such things.)
PS: Ever wonder why Berkshire Hathaway is not located in NY City even though it's managing so many subsidiaries? Could it be even with a crappy website they better understand how technology has changed the business landscape?
Berkshire Hathaway also owns NetJets which allow its executives to fly private jets around the country in a way that best meets their tight schedules. You better believe that Buffet flies all over for meetings.
Even better. Though I know he still uses NetJets quite a bit--my dad worked with someone who now works for NetJets and flies with the Buffets fairly frequently. She says despite the cash and jets they're quite down to Earth--down to cabs and not black cars.
I don't have any experience in this sort of thing beyond the ramen-profitable startup scene, so I'm not entirely well versed in what those structures would be.
I can easily imagine the traditionalist "A Gentleman's Word is His Bond, Seal the Deal With a Handshake" sort of C-level executives. From a purely economic cost/benefit standpoint, if the 100k in opportunity cost/travel/etc is going to turn more than 100k in profit, it would make economic sense to do it. You could probably get some marketing mileage out of it as a nice symbolic gesture with some glossy photos in $finance_mag as well.
At the same time, you need some way of managing/restraining that sort of thing lest you end up with $200,000 "working lunches" which are nothing more than a brief holiday on the company dime.
I've no idea how Berkshire Hathaway operates. Certainly I can see the opportunities for tech to reduce the need for physical meetings in the general case, but this whole argument is about the special cases.
Having a fancy Cisco full-room telepresence/videoconference rates higher than a skype call with a webcam, which (imo) still rates higher than a regular conference call. For higher latency interactions, email (or enterprise groupware and whatnot) is the hands-down winner. Those things might be where the real work gets done (and "my people get together with your people and make it happen"), but they don't have the same symbolic significance.
