Margaret Heffernan Quotes

Distributed workforces are most likely to succeed if their culture is one that values and prioritizes face-to-face communications.

On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.

Believe it or not, joining a video conference call from home doesn't always have to make you feel like an idiot.

Every day at Skype, I am able to connect with employees from around the world and engage with them on a level that just is not possible through a conference call or email.

I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail - even if they happen to be working in the Portland area.

I think because Skype is becoming so much more prevalent, and you're looking at someone else on a screen, it's going to work its way into movies and TV shows in all different ways, which I think is really cool.

I rarely in a working day go more than 10 minutes without looking at Slack.

Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?

Surely in a world of email, video conferencing and virtual assistants, isn't being expected to show up at the office extremely anachronistic? Yet to date it seems that where one works does matter. That creativity and innovation do feed off physical interactions between people.

Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.

In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.

As far as employees are concerned, clearly I like to communicate with them, since we are more than 40,000 people. I like to communicate either through e-mail or through video conferencing, which we do very often, and stream out videos and interviews. But more than that, I believe in traveling to my branches.

We built Zoom for the business customers.

I think many businesses will allow their employees to work from home. The main challenge here is how to make sure Zoom will give a better and safer experience to users than compared to that in an office environment.

I think the one thing about the Zoom calls is unlike being in a room with people where you can look away or drift off, I feel like with Zoom, everyone's face is just dead center, head on, there is no drifting. It takes a lot of energy from me.

The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.

The connection between someone in Leeds and a comedian in Los Angeles would probably never happen if it weren't for MySpace, so it enables friendship and connection far more than it limits it.

Twitter and those platforms just didn't feel natural to me.

When we look at social media, we really look at it on a continuum, and the continuum is from accumulation to instant expression.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.

People need meeting places. You need places where ideas get exchanged and you see each other's faces once in a while.

I like to chat either at my site or, sometimes, through MSN and ICQ. And even if I do reveal my identity, there are a lot of times when no one believes me.

You can have a real ongoing dialogue through social media that wasn't possible before.

The Internet keeps us constantly connected, and the increasing sophistication of mobile devices allows us much greater choice over when, how, and where we work.

I learned that every conversation shouldn't be had via social media.