When I was 12, my friend Bobby and I decided to have an impromptu adventure.

We spotted a long, black Rolls-Royce idling at the corner, peered passed the chauffeur into the rear seat, and recognized the legendary screen star, one of my mother's favorites, Greer Garson.

Leaning toward her window I asked, "May we have a ride Miss Garson?"

Probably stunned that members of our generation recognized her, she lowered the window and asked, "And where are you two boys going?'

"Nowhere special; just around town, I replied."

"Well, okay, get in!" she beamed, seizing the moment.

She instructed her driver to stop at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where the movie "Pretty Woman" was filmed.

She wanted to pick up her second car to personally transport us.

It was another Rolls, this one a vision as magnificent as Lancelot's steed, gleaming in white and silver.

We ambled up Rodeo Drive, across Sunset Boulevard, through a canyon or two, and then she asked where we wanted to be dropped. She had a garden party to attend.

This star was as gracious and generous as anyone might have imagined.

Gasoline cost about twenty-five cents a gallon then, so our automotive sojourn wasn't profligate, and climate change, ecology, and environmental awareness were off in the future.

How things have changed as we have raced past $4 per gallon!

Just tooling about for its own sake, taking a spin, and the hallowed Sunday Drive are now about as popular as discovering mercury in your sushi.

In business, pressing the flesh, meeting people face-to-face, and commuting long distances, especially by car and jet, all once mundane activities are now having global consequences.

Economists are hard at work calculating the carbon footprints left by casual car trips to supermarkets. Environmentalists are fuming over a recent commercial flight that carried only five passengers from the States to London, saying the trip was "criminal" based on its deposits of ice crystals in the atmosphere and unabashed fuel guzzling.

Which leads us to the all important question: How can we make our companies "greener," both by lessening harmful environmental impacts and by ringing the cash register?

The answer is as close as your desk and your purse or pocket.

It's that technology that is now more than 100 years young: the telephone.

I've been preaching the gospel of telephone effectiveness since the "original" fuel crises decades ago. Then, I launched a very successful series of workshops through 40 universities and numerous trade and professional associations that taught folks to replace time and fuel wasting trips with more productive telephone conversations.

The message is even more pertinent today than it was then.

Not only are telephone effectiveness and telemarketing efficient sales and customer service media. They are instruments of prosperity, and dare I say it-of national security.

But where did we get off track? People were vitally interested in developing telephone effectiveness skills in the 1980's and 1990's. But then, demand for the information languished.

How come?

Two main reasons: (1) Fuel prices retreated, making conservation seem unnecessary; and (2) The Internet seemed destined to become the sales and customer service tool of the future, leaving the comparatively quaint telephone in the dust.

Both of these perceptions have been eclipsed.

Experts are telling us that worldwide demand for oil is booming and will continue to increase, especially in rapidly developing, massive countries such as China and India.

So, it's unlikely there will be a major or permanent decline in gas prices.

Alternative energy sources, while promising, are off in the distance and seem to require massive investments, governmental incentives, and infrastructural changes.

Moreover, even if our average gas mileage tripled overnight, nothing would or could stop OPEC from jacking up its prices equally fast, if it determined it was in its interest to do so.

It is becoming clear that the best mileage we'll ever get is from the trip we never take.

The Internet, while ushering in sweeping changes in the way people buy, now with more information and with a world of choices at their fingertips, hasn't replaced the power of sharing productive, real-time, fully interactive encounters with people whose voices, sincerity, and value propositions we can evaluate on the spot.

The one-to-one communication capability of the telephone has never been matched for its cost effectiveness and business-building potential. When teamed with a significant Internet presence, it is becoming more achieving than ever before.

It is clear that well-trained salespeople can eliminate altogether many of the trips they have been used to taking to shake hands with customers. When phone calls are planned and executed properly, "telephone appointments" that are calendared and adhered to can accomplish, in many cases, even more than on-site visits.

Service by telephone has a long and distinguished history, but since the advent of the Internet, companies have tried to offload their customers to the Web, with mixed results. While it is sometimes easier to get an account balance online, or to see if a check has cleared, people still want to talk to intelligent customer service reps, right now, about refinancing their auto loans when they hear interest rates have dropped, or when they seek to get an undeserved finance charge reversed.

Using the phone as much as possible to replace or augment other business communication channels makes even more sense today than ever before based on simple economics. The actual cost of calls, domestically and internationally, has plummeted.

Today, it costs mere pennies to Reach Out and Sell Someone®, whether you're calling Moscow, Idaho or Moscow, Russia.