Beyond the watercooler

Management by Walking Around or MBWA came into vogue in the late 1980s as Tom Peters and Robert Waterman distilled the learnings from their bestselling book In Search of Excellence. MBWA posits that managers pick up meaningful ideas and keep tabs on morale by informally engaging with colleagues in unscripted settings — what we understand as watercooler moments in more modern parlance. Today, that time-honoured practice has become one of the biggest casualties of the Covid-19 pandemic. Those in the WFH zone have made admirable efforts to replicate watercooler moments through WhatsApp and Zoom groups and so on, but everyone