Categories
COVID Ideas

The Future of the Hybrid Office

It’s time to go back to the office. Some of us are already there and others, like me, will be back sometime in 2021. A lot has changed since 2019. Now we all know what a fully remote workforce looks like and most of us know how to host a Zoom meeting (though it’s still surprising how many times I need to tell people to mute their phones).

In his annual letter to JP Morgan shareholders, Jamie Dimon says that he learned that “Performing jobs remotely is more successful when people know one another and already have a large body of existing work to do. It does not work as well when people don’t know one another.” I learned these lessons over years of working in hybrid environments. When I was at AIG, my entire team, including my boss and my teammates were all based in Charlotte North Carolina while I was based in New York. We learned that we needed to meet in person a few times a year to build trust and agree on what to do. These conversations were imperative to getting everyone on the same page. These were the times to have disagreements about what to focus on and what could be postponed. We left these meetings with a plan. Then we could all travel to our own locations and get our work done.

Categories
COVID Life Lessons

Making the Most of This Ugly Year

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— The opening line to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

Ziba’s Holiday Gift 2009. Featuring Ugly.

I still have a holiday gift I got in December of 2009 from the design firm Ziba. They created six brochures on trends for 2010: me, we, happy, human, old, and … ugly. (1)Design companies like to create beautiful and provocative gifts. For example, Thomas Heatherwick’s delightful Christmas gifts were featured in a museum.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Design companies like to create beautiful and provocative gifts. For example, Thomas Heatherwick’s delightful Christmas gifts were featured in a museum.
Categories
COVID

How to Give a Great Birthday Present During Coronavirus

My wonderful mother-in-law was having a milestone birthday last month. In normal times we could have flown down to visit her, had a big party, and celebrated in style. But obviously, we can’t do that. So we needed to figure out a different way to celebrate her big birthday.

Categories
COVID

When Will the Restaurants Re-Open?

From Green Queen

Right now, all the restaurants in New York are closed. Soon, hopefully, they will re-open. What will that be like? Will people go? When I think about this question, it’s just one of a host of “When will we get back to normal?” questions. But I’m not sure that’s the right question. I think we should think about “What will the new normal be?” and “How will we get there?”

Categories
COVID

Global Pandemic and Global Friendship

I keep hearing that we’re in a world of social distancing, but social distancing isn’t the right word. We need social connections more than ever to help keep us sane, but we need to physically distance ourselves from one another. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that the novel coronavirus uses our physical connections as a transmission vector, and the better the in person connections, the more dangerous it is.

Categories
COVID

Whose Life Do You Save?

These days, people are having to make really hard decisions. With the  COVID-19 virus overwhelming Italy, doctors are having to make decisions about who lives and who dies. It raises the great moral question, “Given limited resources, who do you save?”

Categories
COVID

Coronavirus Prevention – Everything Great is Bad for You

Summary: All the things that make a great social event like large groups, diverse groups of people, and close connections also create a great environment to spread coronavirus. After the pandemic is over, it’s worth using the coronavirus prevention guidelines, and going against them, to find great events.

What makes a great social event? Lots of people from all over the world are sharing their ideas and meeting new people. Some people are new, drawn there because they’d heard this is the place to be. Others are old friends, hugging and kissing each other hello. Everyone is interacting intensely, going out for drinks and dinner. Maybe they even share some appetizers or try each other’s drinks.

If you’re been paying attention to the news this week, these are also the things that spread coronavirus: lots of people, close contact, diversity, and sharing. This makes sense because viruses piggyback on the social nature of humans. When we get together and interact in a community, viruses are shared as well.