As much as he enjoys working out of Java Jack’s, however, SGF Consulting’s Hussman can’t buy the notion that conducting business over a cuppa is anything new under the sun. (In fact, it has a long history, as the sidebar three pages back explains.) People who romanticize technology tend to be “amazingly myopic” on the subject of the brave new world they have created, he says.
“People like contractors and plumbers have been meeting in restaurants for years and years,” Hussman adds. “If you had 20 people working on a housing project with a general contractor, where were they going to meet?”
In a broad, social sense, the fact that you can take your office almost anywhere is, indeed, profound. But a working lunch is still a working lunch.
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“This Wakeful and Civil Drink” It’s been fueling business for centuries. “This coffee drink hath caused a greater sobriety among the nations. Whereas formerly, apprentices and clerks with others used to take a morning draught of ale, beer, or wine, which, by the dizziness they cause in the brain, made many unfit for business, they use now to play the Good-fellows in this wakeful and civil drink.” —An English commentator, 1660 Tom Standage, an editor for The Economist magazine, writes in his 2005 book A History of the World in Six Glasses, that within decades of coffee drinking’s appearance in 15th-century Yemen, coffeehouses around the Middle East had become respectable meeting places for conversations both social, commercial, and political. In the 20th century, electronic communications extended the conversation in a global network that often had coffeehouses as its outposts. “Wi-Fi fits in beautifully with all of this,” Standage says. “In London in the 17th century, people used coffeehouses as mailing addresses, since street numbering and direct-to-the-door delivery had not been introduced. They also went to coffeehouses to read the newspaper, pamphlets, and so on. And they used them as meeting rooms for business purposes, since meeting in taverns was disreputable. So the introduction of Wi-Fi into coffee shops today brings this right up to date: You can, once again, go to a coffee shop to check your mail, read the news, and do business.” In the first decade of the 21st century, Standage says, “several trends—more flexible working, more mobile working, more self-employment as short-term contracts become more prevalent—militate in favor of coffee shops as temporary offices and meeting rooms for businesspeople.” |
