When Thomas took over his new role, his first act was to have multiple small informal lunches with groups across his entire staff of 1400 people.
What they told me again and again is that we are wasting huge time and money in meetings. The amount of money we were burning in people time in wasteful meetings was mind-blowing. I realized instead of hiring in or outsourcing there was one untapped jewel sitting in the middle of my department and that by doing meetings better I could create more time for people already in the company and who have the skills I need now.
So, how to engage a group of medics and scientists in meetings when they’d all rather be out saving the world from rotavirus, shingles, cancer, and worse? The answer, it turned out, was to stop focusing on meeting efficiency and start thinking about meeting health. We set up a “meeting hospital” and for three months we took in meetings that were sick, needy, and near death and brought them back to life. Quite a few of the techniques in this book were developed in the emergency ward of the meeting hospital.
The results read like one of those “before and after” weight-loss advertisements. After three months 97 percent of participants found meetings more purposeful, clear, and engaging.
Clearly, with the right antidote and a big bucket of innovation we can tackle nearly meetings. But the question is, if they are so manifestly unhealthy, why do we keep having them?
We nearly meet because … in a mad world it makes sense
If I worked every day in some of the companies I visit, I am certain I would be nearly meeting in a week.
When I started working with one of my clients, part of their business had a monthly six-hour conference call involving 100 people around the world. That’s 72 hours a year or nearly two whole working weeks. Multiply that by the number of participants and you are looking at a collective year and a half of working life. It had better be a pretty important subject, wouldn’t you think? But it wasn’t. It was a business-as-usual thing. No one wants to be in that meeting. Certainly not for six hours. But no one feels that they can legitimately not take part. So they sit there, rolling their eyes in various locations around the world, one eye on the BlackBerry, the other on the clock, pretending to meet. In an illogical system, it’s the logical response.
We dealt with this meeting in a way that I strongly recommend you try in your own company. We blew it up. And then we only put back what was absolutely needed. It turned out that the real hot topics could be best showcased in a bimonthly webforum. And the informal information sharing is now done, café style, at the end of the day every six weeks or so.
We nearly meet because … we have lost control of our diaries
I have come to realize that diaries are like houses. It is easy to fill them both with unwanted clutter.
In 2008 the Pearls decided to spend a couple of years living in Italy. When we rented out our house in London we put half the furniture in storage and took the rest with us to Piedmont. On our return we had only 50 percent of our original furniture and the house felt—absolutely fine! Or to put it another way, we had been living with twice as much stuff as we needed but hadn’t noticed because we had got so used to all the clutter around us, we’d stopped seeing it. So, now take a look at your diary and all the meetings in it. Which half needs to go into storage? There will be two kinds of meetings cluttering up your day: Standing meetings and Ad Hoc ones.
Standing meetings are the regular ones which are fixed (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly) at the beginning of the year and/or project. They are like the furniture, fixtures, and fittings. You don’t necessarily know who gave them to you or why they are there, but they have been around so long you have ceased to notice them; they have become the background to your life. The rest are Ad Hoc meetings. They appear unexpectedly in response to a situation, problem or request. I think of these as impulse buys that you see at the weekend and “must have,” or mail—including junk mail—that arrives in your letterbox clamoring for your attention.
The rules for de-cluttering a house or diary are very similar. You need a brutal cull of the unwanted contents you have accumulated and a severely selective, No Junk, entry policy to prevent any new garbage crossing the threshold.
We nearly meet because … it’s an attractive alternative to real work
Steve, a prominent LA tax and business advisor, takes client service seriously. And so he should. His starry clients are the sort of people who expect him to be on call 24/7.
In case you were thinking your senior people are capriciously demanding, you should spend a day or two in the performing arts where Stars can be really Starry. One tale I know to be true from my time in the opera world is that of a sumptuously gifted but notoriously high-maintenance operatic soprano who was feeling a little warm in the back of her limo while driving through Manhattan. Too grand to lean forward and ask the driver to turn up the air-conditioning, she picked up the limo phone, called her agent in Los Angeles, who then called the driver in New York with the message.
Steve talks of his earlier career in a large corporate practice where he was expected to attend a daily meeting at 11.00 known (I kid you not) as the Donut Meeting because there was nothing much else to talk about. “I was an outlier,” he admits.
I was one of the few people who thought that if you are in a service company that the real priority was to, well, serve clients. I felt that instead of sitting around shooting the breeze there might be things that the client would actually want you to do, things you were, er, paid to do. So I used to excuse myself from the Donut meetings and go to talk to some clients. Actually pick up the phone and speak to them. It seemed to me that most of the others were actually scared of doing that. You’d ask them if they had called client A and they’d answer yes. “When?” Three weeks ago. “And since then?” Well, they’d been busy in meetings.
Clients don’t want to hear you are in meetings. They want to hear you on the other end of the phone. It’s not great telling billionaire clients bad news, but I find it’s always better than hiding away. Instead of holding a Donut meeting, I would go and talk to a few people and get the job done.
Steve has nicely summed up one of the key messages of this book. Instead of holding wasteful meetings, get out there and start having the real meetings and conversations that really matter.
Or, as the T-shirt would say: Fewer Meetings—More Meeting.
We nearly meet because … technology* makes it so easy
It’s 10.58 on the bustling concourse of a London train station. Suddenly a granny throws down her walking stick and starts jiving. All over the station people join her. They dance in concentration and in silence, perfectly synchronized by the music they hear on their iPod headphones. Exactly two minutes 11 seconds later the dance stops as magically as it started and the participants melt away.
The Flash Mob that has just happened is a great illustration of how technology helps us nearly meet. None of this would have been possible without the internet. The participants convened online, practiced their dance at home via web cams, texted each other where and when to meet. Everything has been prepared and performed at arm’s length. That’s its beauty and irony. It’s less entertainment and more a shared personal experience for those in the know. A silent dance, an un-performance by non-performers. A crowd of people dancing alone is so very 21st-century. And a perfect illustration of how technology loves us to nearly meet.
I really admire people who have embraced the nearly meeting medium with creative flair. People like Eric Whiteacre who have created amazing online choirs, or StreetWars, who galvanize whole towns into staging water pistol ambushes through social media.
That said, I am doubtful about whether all this supposed digital connectivity