Here, there and everywhere

I had a home office before it was au courant. It seems that my business has always involved going to clients rather than having them come to me. Somehow, the subject did come up occasionally, and I would always be honest about my office location. Of course, being as glib as always, I would add, “It is good enough for the President of the United States, so it ought to be good enough for me.” I’ve always had a dedicated workspace and clients who did occasionally come to visit were always more impressed with the frugality of the decision than they were with the actual location.

Where you work is even less important today than it was 20 years ago. We are amazingly connected. (Some would say hyper-connected.) I can do business from my desktop in my home office, from my laptop while slurping a coffee at Starbucks, or from my smartphone pretty much anyplace. I work with advisors from all over the country — most of whom would have to buy a plane ticket if they wanted to see me — so they care little about where I work and a whole lot about how I work and what I can do to help them with their DI sales efforts.

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal this weekend. We are involved in a couple of wars, the Mideast is exploding and Japanese nuclear reactors are threatening to melt down. So, the world situation is pretty much, well, normal. Yet President Obama is being savaged for being on a commerce-building trip in South and Central America. I’ve got to assume that his ability to communicate and do business from anywhere is at least as good as mine — perhaps even a bit better.