Some Meetings are Worth the Trip
August 25, 2026
“Why being there matters.”
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Zoom and Teams have permanently changed business, mostly for the better. A meeting that once required an airline ticket can now happen instantly from opposite sides of the world. But there are moments when being in the same room still matters. In research published in Nature, Melanie Brucks of Columbia University and Jonathan Levav of Stanford compared pairs collaborating by videoconference with pairs working face-to-face. Across laboratory experiments and a field study involving employees in five countries, the researchers found that virtual pairs generated fewer creative ideas. Interestingly, virtual communication did not appear to hurt the groups’ ability to select which ideas to pursue. Their conclusion wasn’t that video meetings are bad; it was that different forms of communication may be better suited to different kinds of work.
I’ve spent much of my career building businesses through relationships, and some of the most important conversations I’ve had didn’t happen during the formal meeting. They happened over lunch, walking down a hallway, sitting at a bar after dinner or during the ten minutes when everyone was supposedly finished talking business. You can’t schedule those moments on a calendar because you don’t know they’re coming. Technology is excellent at making communication efficient. What it has a harder time reproducing is spontaneity. For entrepreneurs, that distinction matters. Use technology to eliminate unnecessary meetings—but when the objective is imagination, trust or a breakthrough idea, sometimes it is worth getting on the airplane.
The Takeaway: Technology makes it easier than ever to stay connected, but sometimes the most valuable business conversations still happen face-to-face.
