现场参观癖

Unless you’re the Governor of Georgia, you know we are not going back to normal. But where are we going?

If you’re an allocator, probably nowhere.

与一些右翼思想家的观点相反，Covid-19具有高度传染性，正在杀人。它会在一段时间内继续杀人。

我首先假设，董事会和赞助组织认识到，他们的受托责任的一个关键部分是确保他们委托管理其受益资产池的人没有完全死亡。这意味着他们必须是健康的。

Given the current pandemic and its long tail, I cannot imagine a Board or Trustees or sponsor permitting its CIO and investment staff to participate in non-essential external business meetings. Likewise, I cannot imagine allocators are keen to risk life and limb to participate in such meetings.

And to be clear, regular, on-site manager visits and in-person new manager due diligence visits are non-essential meetings.

与这些会议相关的风险是完全不对称的，对此类会议的需求是基于行为偏见。

These meetings require staff to travel, and the elements of travel — planes, trains, ride-sharing services, hotels, restaurants — expose them to life-threatening risks (while exposing others to the employee’s possible asymptomatic condition). Any perceived benefits derived from in-person diligence meetings pale in the face of the consequences of an easily transmissible and fatal virus.

But beyond this simple science, it’s time we realize that a site visit is an anachronistic diligence requirement.

Video conferences, phones calls, written materials (ideally available in the cloud), and references can be used to accomplish the same results and provide all the basic information. These can be supplemented with technology. Today, for a reasonable price, managers can buy robots with audio and video capabilities that allocators can remotely operate to tour of a manager’s office and interact with the staff. This technology also allows multiple members of the allocator’s staff to participate in the “visit.”

I can hear my contemporaries rejecting such a new-fangled approach and appealing to the old adage that “before I can hire a manager I need to look him in the eyes.” Not only does this appeal put a behavioral bias ahead of community welfare, but it is rendered useless when the manager is wearing a mask.

Face it, Covid-19 changes everything.

More deeply, the site visit fetish is perversely predicated on the belief that the allocator/manager relationship is fundamentally antagonistic, with the manager endeavoring to hide some key fact about the company or strategy. A site visit gives the allocator on-the-ground the opportunity to uncover this perceived deception.

抛开分配者扮演秘密松鼠的能力不谈，想想建立在这种不信任之上的互利信托关系注定会失败。分配人/经理的关系必须首先建立在信任的基础上：您相信经理将始终以您的最佳利益行事，这包括及时披露情况的重大变化（假设它没有根据全面的保密协议埋葬所有员工）。真正的信任否定了面对面会谈的必要性。

Additionally, manager site visits falsely assume that co-location is the default work structure. As the pandemic shows, this structure presents managers and their clients with deadly concentration risk. The assumption reveals not only a disregard for the health of the co-located workforce but also an ignorance of collaborative technologies and the benefits of distributed work forces.

非必要的物理会议的规范也适用于访问分配者工作场所的经理。这些会议通常要求经理使用共同的旅行方式到达您的办公室。（还有一个给经理们的提示：鉴于目前这么多经理的表现不佳，现在不是争论乘坐私人飞机参加非必要会议的时候。）

即使在适当的社会距离和安全措施下，他们的存在也会给你的工作场所带来不必要的风险。让经理解释一下这个会议用技术是无法完成的。

In the end, all this is quite disruptive to one’s work flow and common practices. Sure, it requires a new mode of interaction – but if we assume the health and welfare of you and colleagues is required to properly exercise your duties as fiduciaries, there is no real choice.

最后一个想法——我真的很后悔写这封信亚博赞助欧冠because I so love being a part of them — industry conferences are non-essential activities. Not only are they non-essential; they are the epitome of a high-risk event. Conferences bring together scores of people from all over the world who, through their physical presence in a confined area, interact with each other and then, a few days later, go back out into the world.

No amount of social distancing (and we can forget about elbow bumps) and hand sanitizer can mitigate this risk.

But if you’re still thinking about attending an industry conference this fall, use this as your benchmark: For the first time since World War II, Oktoberfest 2020 in Munich was cancelled.