OAG Travel News

Do I sincerely want to take the office with me when I travel? It is a rhetorical question for most travelers these days in the face of growing pressure to spend as little time as possible getting where they’re going, while being as productive as possible on the way.
Thanks to space-age  communications – in-flight phones, e-mail, voice-mail, palm-top computers and mobile devices that pack the punch of desk-top PCs, and the new generation of mobile broadband  – we are faced with the opportunity (and obligation) of staying in touch with anyone anywhere in the world at any time; and  perhaps more ominously, for anyone to keep in touch with you.
It is quite a challenge to anyone’s management style to go convincingly missing these days, although I have been known to check out of my hotel with the bedside message light still blinking. Even if you think you are safely cocooned in chill-out mode in a first class cabin halfway across the Pacific.
But if you’re going to do all your business by phone and e-mail, there doesn’t seem much point in traveling. Travel is about hands-on experience and face-to-face relationships. What we need is a strategy for keeping out of touch – or rather, keeping in touch on our own terms.
            Back in the old days (and I go back a long way) life on the road was fairly simple: ‘Is there a number where we can reach you?’ Or, ‘Please call when you arrive,’ my boss would say when I popped my head round his door to say I was leaving for the airport. Those were the days… before direct dialing, when you sometimes had to book an international call. The worst that could happen when you got to the hotel was a garbled telex (remember the telex?), which you then decided whether or not you had received. You could go missing for days on the strength of a fugitive telex back home.
            In-flight options were simple too. There was the in- flight movie and elevator music on the sound channels and earphones with those little plugs that used to bore their way into your brain. So as a back-of-the-envelope man, I would wine and dine and lip read the movie while drafting the corporate long-range plan – which ensured me a good night’s sleep.
            Nowadays, you have to make the agonizing management decision whether to watch the seat-back video or chat with the corporate Kremlin by telephone, fax or on-line with your laptop (although this is mostly done in the airline ads). You lift the handset from beneath the armrest or the seatback in front and swipe your credit card to be in touch anywhere in the world via terrestrial cellular systems or satellite. You are now expected to stay completely wired at all times, providing you with several more hours in which to work, drain laptop batteries and forget to call your loved ones.
            Back-seat telephones have become a familiar sight. The latest digital systems offer fax transmission and reception (via a keypad and seatback screen) along with news, weather and real-time stock market reports.
            There is now the promise (or threat) of ground-to-air telephone calls.
            Fortunately, you are able to reject an incoming call when the caller’s number appears on the screen. If you’re not at your seat when the phone rings, the incoming number will be stored as a message. So you may want to ask to change seats.
            Unfortunately, it’s harder to find excuses not to check your e-mail back at the office. Soon there’ll be no place left to hide.
            The secret of Management by Absence is to convince people that it’s their fault that they cannot get hold of you. And that you’d get hold of them if only you could. But it’s important to keep the initiative. There’s nothing like firing off electronic messages from a moving target to keep people on their toes. This allows you to pre-empt calls to you. Exploit time-zones by leaving voice-mail messages when there’s nobody in the office. Never do business in the country you’re visiting, but always contrive to be on the phone to somewhere else. Experts leave a trail of unrequited requests to call back (‘Ah, he’s just left for the airport. Have you got his mobile?’).
            A major problem (and opportunity) with faxes and e-mail is that few people believe that they’ve arrived. This has led to ‘bundling’ whereby people send an e-mail, then a fax to check the e-mail got there, and then phone the recipient to tell them about the e-mail. Some people connect the fax to the paper-shredder, on the principle we applied to top-secret documents in the army: ‘Destroy before reading.’
Or use the scrambler. The latest fax machines have a special control which randomly squeezes lines to illegibility or else expands them into a sort of supermarket bar-code.
            The best approach, if you really want to get your message through, is to scatter  e-mails to several mail boxes.   
            Thanks to the marvels of ‘broadband wireless internet telephony’ anyone calling your office number can reach you with out needing to know whether you are actually at your desk, a couple of rows in front of you in the same aircraft cabin, or on the other side of the world – possibly at the next table in some chic eatery in Shanghai.
Airlines are now installing broadband internet access so that you can use your laptop as a telephone. You may not always be able to use your mobile on the plane, but you can use your laptop to send e-mails. If someone dials your direct line at the office while you are sitting on the plane, your laptop will ring. Switch it to voice-mail and relax.
State-of-the-art travel means never having to say you’re sorry.
www.rogerandrandy.com