I agree that there's a lot of value in face-to-face interactions. Whenever I meet with clients or partners, I always try to do the meetings in person, because it's easier to reach a desirable outcome that way.
For particularly difficult discussions, such as delivering bad news, face-to-face is the only way to go, IMO.
It's interesting to note that even a distributed company like Automattic, which has gained some fame for having employees all over the globe, realizes the need to meet face-to-face once in a while:
"Probably the biggest disadvantage to being distributed is the lack of social interaction. Online tools help make up for some of this, but most people like to spend some time together to make their work experience more enjoyable. The good news is that there are ways to compensate for this. We took inspiration from the MySQL team and started having in person meetups for the whole company every 6 months."
For particularly difficult discussions, such as delivering bad news, face-to-face is the only way to go, IMO.
It's interesting to note that even a distributed company like Automattic, which has gained some fame for having employees all over the globe, realizes the need to meet face-to-face once in a while:
"Probably the biggest disadvantage to being distributed is the lack of social interaction. Online tools help make up for some of this, but most people like to spend some time together to make their work experience more enjoyable. The good news is that there are ways to compensate for this. We took inspiration from the MySQL team and started having in person meetups for the whole company every 6 months."
http://toni.org/2010/03/08/5-reasons-why-your-company-should...