distributed — and I don’t mean mobile workforces. It’s kind of like the second wave of outsourcing. [Companies] are saying, we’ll keep our client-service managers as part of the team, but the talent we actually need for the project is not a cost-effective model — to have these really big teams and large over- heads when we can sort of on-demand that talent. There’s a new network in the U.K. called Lawyers On Demand that is doing phenomenally well, where it’s taking all these disgruntled lawyers from top law firms and giving them a marketplace to sell their services.

What’s going to happen is, I believe, that the face-to-face meeting will become equally important because people will

have a lot more virtual interaction, so they will want to come together at different points in the year. I think what’s going to change is the way those meetings are used. They won’t just be information shares and knowledge exchange. A lot of relationship build- ing is going to have to happen in those meetings.

I do think, though, the way conferences are put on and the way conferences are run will change. I have a close relation- ship with the founders of TaskRabbit [an online-based task and errand service]. They just recently launched jobs, which means that they can take on tasks that require more than an hour or a day but can actually take a week. I’ve

known people in the conference busi- ness that, rather than having big teams now, they go into different markets and hire rabbits. And these rabbits are get- ting so good, there’s such a passion and energy for doing these conferences, it’s like, why would we have this full team of people that sit there for most of the week and then they’re on when we’re doing a conference, when we can hire these people on demand? It’s a bit like cloud computing. You can scale up and scale down based on the actual needs of your business versus having asset- heavy models that don’t necessarily make sense.

. — As told to Christopher Durso For more information: rachelbotsman.com

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