Memos from Quarantine #33: Stay at Home - See the World

If you’d known your last trip was exactly that, would you have done anything differently?

I’m talking last February or March, whenever you had your last bit of business travel before the pandemic set in. If you’d known then that it would be it – I mean it – until God knows when, would you have taken photos? Left a bigger tip? Taken an extra moment to appreciate the amenities – the seats and suites that come with elite business travel?

My last jaunt was to Dallas and Charlotte, the week of March 9. Had a lively, well-attended dinner roundtable in Dallas on March 10, and I emerged from that thinking “Hey, maybe we can do this. Maybe small events are our immediate future.” Two days later, my scheduled dinner in Charlotte was canceled because one-by-one all of the area enterprises were laying down the law: “No more outside events.” In the course of an afternoon, it seemed, the live events business evaporated, and I flew home the next day through a near-empty airport on a near-empty flight. Yes, I took pictures. But I haven’t looked at one of my favorite travel apps since, except to say “You still there?”

What a difference. What a world of difference. A year ago, I was preparing for RSA Conference, to spend a week in San Francisco among 35,000 of my best friends in the industry. Scores of video interviews in two live studios. Restaurant events every night. Sore feet from new shoes (remember those?). Today I’m sitting by the woodstove in the colonial farm on the hundred-acre wood, concerned about frozen pipes and the critters seeking shelter in my root cellar.

People ask constantly – I’m sure you hear it, too. “Do you miss it? Do you miss all the travel?” And I don’t. There’s nothing glamorous about the constant shuffle through airports, planes, hotels and Ubers, the constant sense of urgency that you need to get somewhere else. If anything, I say, I miss only the takeoffs and landings. Those were the two times, guaranteed, where you were off limits from the outside world. Today no such boundaries exist.

But necessity is the mother of resiliency, right? We no longer can visit the world, so through collaborative technology … we bring the world to us. Citrix, Teams, Zoom – whatever your virtual venue of choice, how much time do you now spend there? Team meetings, client calls, virtual events. As someone said to me recently, “What used to be a five-minute conversation in someone’s office is now a 30-minute video meeting on your calendar.” We spend entire days on camera. It’s like working in front of a mirror. And instead of making small talk about airline lounges, hotel perks and city diners, we’re swapping notes about our green screens, ring lighting and HD webcams.

I realize I’ve been digressing since word one, but there’s a point to all of this. And that is that, despite the near year-long moratorium on world travel, my company continues to do a terrific job of bringing the world to you.

Start here: Upcoming over the next few weeks, we’re hosting three Virtual Cybersecurity Summits that span the globe. Beginning here, with our global IAM Summit, check out each to see the unique topics and speakers:

And in just the past week, I’ve been privileged to welcome to my virtual studio the CISOs of Cielo, the Brazilian payment card processor, as well as the World Health Organization, discussing topics ranging from cybersecurity leadership to how to respond to the SolarWinds supply chain attack.

There are no imminent changes. The hundred-acre wood is under two feet of snow, and it’s not melting before spring. Likewise, COVID-19 and its alarming variants retain a deadly grip on us, and I don’t envision a return to business travel before ... fall? You tell me.

But if the past year has proven anything, it’s that where there’s wireless, there’s a way. In some ways, the world has never been any better connected than it is now. And it’s not such a bad thing, is it, to experience it from the same time zone every day?