Reach Is Cheap. Judgment Isn't.

I can still picture the IBM cards. In the 1970s, running a computer program meant handing over a stack of them and waiting your turn, and heaven help you if you got those cards out of order.

By the 1980s, “portable” computing meant hauling a box the size and weight of a portable sewing machine with a keyboard bolted to a screen heavy enough to strain your arm. I don't remember if it was Compaq or IBM, but I remember the weight, the bulk, and Lotus 1-2-3. It was a fabulous advance over the air conditioned IT rooms it replaced and a coveted tool if you were into that sort of thing.

Today, the computing power of my phone and my laptop dwarfs what most large institutions had access to back then, and neither one requires two hands to carry.

The Arc of Video Conferencing

For me, video went through the same arc, on its own schedule. In the 1990s, I remember that video conferencing meant a dedicated room with a lot of big, expensive equipment. The room had to be booked in advance and only one or two people were trained to use it.

Ours connected our group headquarters in Cleveland to our corporate HQ in Los Angeles and to the industrial companies in our portfolio, in Canada, Sweden, Holland, Thailand, and a few other places. Not many companies had this video conferencing capability; it was considered cutting edge; having it felt like a big advantage in integrating management teams, because it was one.

At the time, I still logged many thousands of miles a year making trips to these places. But not everyone could travel. Getting lots of people back and forth across the ocean would have been cost prohibitive.

Video Allowed Team Members to Connect

What video did was allow other members of the team to make the same trip virtually, to build real relationships with their counterparts in these far-flung places. They could share ideas, problem solve, build company culture, improve decision making, and get buy-in with video far more easily than by phone.

Video built human connection points deeper in the management team and helped integrate a far-flung organization in a way that flying only a few people around never could.

The New Video Reality

Now I run an investing and advisory business and an Ohio-based manufacturing company from Vero Beach, Florida, on a laptop, with internet connection, more than four decades of experience, and not much more.

Most days start with video calls early, and they don't stop until evening: team members in Ohio and Atlanta, and the potential to meet with distributors and customers from Iowa to Italy, from the Midwest to the Middle East, wherever the day takes me, or wherever I choose to take the day.

I can see faces, share a screen, review photos or a 3D animated video of a part or a subassembly or a system, or a business process, and be part of a conversation as detailed and as personal as if I had flown there myself.

I am woefully overdue to get back on the road and in the air, but meanwhile, the leverage on my time and reach from video is outstanding, and I don't have to get in a car to do it, let alone get on a plane.

Travel Cost and Travel Time

For a small manufacturer, used properly, video is an everyday force multiplier. More than ever, traveling costs real money and real time. It is still important to build relationships in person, especially with customers in the field, in places where video isn't an option. But among our team members in the business, video collapses the distance between the person making a decision and the place where that decision has to work, whether that's a team member, a plant manager, a customer, or a supplier. Certainly not all, but many of the conversations that used to require an airplane flight can now be handled with a laptop, from a desk in Vero Beach or anywhere else.

AI as the Next Revolution

I suspect artificial intelligence is going to stretch that arc further still. I don't know what that will look like, but I'm thinking it will be huge. I have watched this kind of metamorphosis happen before, with computing and with video, so the general direction is not hard to guess: an explosion of options, generated faster and at lower cost, with decisions arriving at warp speed.

If there's a lesson in it for anyone running a business today, it's this: the constraints of weight and distance are mostly gone. Data weighs nothing and can be accumulated in gigantic chunks without moving a muscle. But here's the thing that isn't going away: you need knowledge and contextual experience to sort through it all and know which data actually matters to a decision, and in what order.

Never Replacing Management Judgement

Data is endless. Options are endless. AI can make any one of them look clever, essential, and well supported. So what's left is management judgment built from experience, the kind that sorts real priorities out of an ocean of possibilities, and questions the ones built on assumptions that don't hold up, no matter how polished they look.

Good management judgment is still in short supply. In some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Managing successfully in person always required experience and judgment. It was just a far slower process when the data gathering took longer and the logistics of travel had to be accommodated.

Today, with management by video call fed by endless data, now expanded and organized by AI, you can make a lot of decisions faster; but whether they are better decisions or not still depends on the context of what you know, not just how fast you know it.