Alan Manly, CEO of Group Colleges Australia and author of The Unlikely Entrepreneur

International leaders have every opportunity to communicate electronically but interestingly enough they travel the globe to meet and greet each other. To get the full picture of what a person is like requires a face to face meeting. Networking comes in all shapes and sizes. Meetings between individuals, such as with the neighbours next door to big business deals all share similar follow up questions. What did they look like? How did they receive your message? These predictable questions will inevitably have the routine responses. They looked, followed by an assessment of appearance that describes the body language. They sat around, an interpretation of the mood follows, such as relaxed, stressed, or didn’t say much, but you could tell they were or were not interested. This is obvious when you view videos of world leaders of showing a smile or a grimace when asked to sit or stand close to each other. Such pictures tell a thousand words and only a face to face meeting reveals these issues.