Face-To-Face.

KINDLEBERGER, CHARLES P.

A year or two ago, a daughter of a friend of mine wrote a book which put forward the view that information transfers--email, fax, and overnight delivery--had advanced to such an extent that workers could do their jobs at home without needing to commute to the office. Trains and airplanes would be limited to students traveling to and from their universities--although current advertisements suggest that college degrees, including PhDs, can be obtained over the Internet. In the new century, Friday dress codes would apply every day. Along with the students in the air and on the rails would be honeymooners, retirees, and vacationers.

I was dubious then and remain so. I once asked a junior executive whom I was supposed to be teaching at M.I.T.'s Sloan School, and who had mentioned a problem with his company's British subsidiary, how he would attack it: write, wire, telephone? "No," he said. "I would go there. I would want to know that the subsidiary's manager understood fully what was needed, and that he knew that I knew what it was."

I later met a Colombian whom I had taught in an undergraduate international trade class. He had told me that if he had a problem selling flowers from his 250 acres of greenhouses in Colombia, he would straighten it out by visiting the buyer.

It is hard, moreover, to imagine completing a complex M&A, IPO purchase, or sale of equities or bonds without a gathering of underwriters, brokers, bankers, and lawyers who will want to keep an eye on one another. Trade negotiators gather in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and next year in the Middle East, and protestors gather with them to be sure of being heard, perhaps clearly, but in any event loudly.

A standard New Yorker cartoon has the boss on one side of the desk and a man sitting across from him about to be fired--face-to-face.

Many years ago, French sociologist Michel Croizier wrote a book called The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (University of Chicago Press, 1964), which noted that face-to-face communication between officials at adjacent levels was upsetting. If an official at Level D wants to deal with one at Level C, he is inclined to leap a step and call on his boss' boss at Level B. In the United States, the accused has a right to see his accuser face-to-face.

In the Boston area, and doubtless in many other places, there is a process underway in real estate called "mansionization." A person with great success in profession or business wants to move up in the world with a big house, many rooms, gardens, swimming pool and the like. Modest neighbors who fear their abodes would be overwhelmed object. NIMBY ("not in my back yard") comes into play when either inexpensive housing for middle- or lower-income folk or very expensive palatial structures creep into the area. In a recent case, an amateur planning board was called on to decide whether or not to grant an exception to a town ruling against residential structures in excess of 4,000 square feet in area. The petitioner brought two lawyers, an architect, and a landscape gardener, rather than rely on the written word.

Whether airplanes will empty out of investment bankers, brokers, lawyers, accountants, and consultants, and their ilk or not is of little interest to teachers retired decades ago whose feet no longer itch to tread the world. My curiosity is aroused, however, by advertisements in such periodicals as The Economist, holding out the prospect of higher degrees to stay-at-homes hunched over the computer or listening to tapes. It may help to learn from television rather than radio or computer text, and see a person; even better, to be allowed to telephone at the end of a lecture and pose questions. My not very trustworthy instinct, however, favors real teachers rather than electronic ones, though the latter may cover much more territory.

In any event, airports seem still to be crowded, and airplanes still full and late.

Charles P. Kindleberger is Professor Emeritus at MIT.