I don't have any experience in this sort of thing beyond the ramen-profitable startup scene, so I'm not entirely well versed in what those structures would be.

I don't have any experience in this sort of thing beyond the ramen-profitable startup scene, so I'm not entirely well versed in what those structures would be. I can easily imagine the traditionalist "A Gentleman's Word is His Bond, Seal the Deal With a Handshake" sort of C-level executives. From a purely economic cost/benefit standpoint, if the 100k in opportunity cost/travel/etc is going to turn more than 100k in profit, it would make economic sense to do it. You could probably get some marketing mileage out of it as a nice symbolic gesture with some glossy photos in $finance_mag as well. At the same time, you need some way of managing/restraining that sort of thing lest you end up with $200,000 "working lunches" which are nothing more than a brief holiday on the company dime. I've no idea how Berkshire Hathaway operates. Certainly I can see the opportunities for tech to reduce the need for physical meetings in the general case, but this whole argument is about the special cases. Having a fancy Cisco full-room telepresence/videoconference rates higher than a skype call with a webcam, which (imo) still rates higher than a regular conference call. For higher latency interactions, email (or enterprise groupware and whatnot) is the hands-down winner. Those things might be where the real work gets done (and "my people get together with your people and make it happen"), but they don't have the same symbolic significance.