and even the toughest meeting revolutionaries can unravel when their ego is threatened. Mistakes are inevitable if you really commit to doing things differently. Can you handle that and learn from them?
And, finally, could you
• Be ruthless, mercilessly killing off “nearly” meetings you don’t need? You’ll be brutally hacking into the undergrowth of regular meetings choking your day. And culling the cute, furry little ad hoc meetings that look up with those puppy eyes and say, “Take me home, I won’t take up much time and I’ll make you feel soooo important.”
If you can answer yes to these questions, then welcome to the rest of the book. Please, stand and repeat after me the motto of the Guild of Meeting Mischief Makers. “Finis ad Fastidium!”† That’s “Bore No More,” to you and me.
Remember, this isn’t a book about boring meetings and whether you want to have them. It’s a book about boring lives and whether you want to live one.
* Despite our title I’m not sure I’d recommend a donut as a meeting snack. As the New York Obesity Research Center puts it, “The average donut is nothing more than refined sugar and flour, artificial flavors and partially hydrogenated oil that’s loaded with trans fats. When it comes to health, the only thing good about them is the hole.”
† Some clients do prefer the alternative Latin motto which goes: “Quaerimus Et Si Non Invenio Facimus Malum” (we go looking for trouble—and if we don’t find any, we make some) but it’s harder to print on a T-shirt.
The Multi-billion dollar unforced error of Business
I worked with a major UK insurance firm a few years ago. Every year eager executives would ask its CEO what his vision was for the following year. His answer was always the same: “To make one less huge mistake.” He was experienced enough to know that the revenue would flow in. His concern was wasting it once it arrived. If he could tackle or prevent this year’s big—and avoidable—mistake, then the revenue would really count instead of gushing away into a deep hole of the company’s own making.
This chapter is about a big mistake that almost all companies are going to make this year. And the next. And the one after that. I call it Nearly Meeting.
How do you know if you are nearly meeting?
A nearly meeting is any meeting where the participants fail to get real value out of their coming together. They are the ones which offer a poor return on the time and effort invested—for the individuals taking part and the organizations they work for.
Nearly meetings are the ones where problems are half solved, the issues are partially understood, the right things are almost said. They come that close to being useful. If you ever stagger out of a meeting room wondering where the day went and what you did with it, you’ve probably been nearly meeting. You’ll have semi-resolved problems, almost discussed what truly needs to be discussed and practically decided what to do about it.
I am reminded of Billy Crystal’s magician character in William Goldman’s fairytale comedy The Princess Bride who claims the hero isn’t alive or dead, but “mostly dead.” And so it is with nearly meetings. We are “mostly” meeting. And it’s completely frustrating.
People complain about the difficulties of virtual meetings—as though if only people were off the phone and in a room together the problem would be solved. All nearly meetings are virtual—whether you are face to face or not. We should probably not even call them meetings at all; missings would be more accurate.
“Busy day, dear?”
“Murder. I’ve been in back-to-back missings since 7.30.”
Nearly meeting is a strange no-man’s-land between being separate and really connecting. I suggest it’s where many of us spend the majority of our working days.
Counting the cost
Whoa. Did you just give me “the look”? It’s the imperceptible tightening of the brows and lips which says, “I am a hard-nosed business person and what does this soft issue have to do with my bottom line, sonny?”
I’ve seen it the length and breadth of the business world, from boardroom to shop floor. And when I see it I ask clients—as I ask you now—to consider the following:
Imagine you are in a role which requires you to attend three hours of meetings a day. And let’s say you’d score those meetings 70 percent effective. Let’s also imagine there are 100 people like you in the company and that your average wage is, say, $100k. None of this is particularly far-fetched, you’d agree? OK, then.
You just wasted 82 days in meetings this year, costing your company a pretty significant $2m. What’s more, if you were to continue at this rate for a conventional career, you’d be burning a total of nine years, six months, and three days of your working life.
This is hypothetical, but far from fantastical. Here’s a real example which I put in front of the board of a major pharmaceutical company who weren’t immediately convinced that ineffective meetings were having a significant effect on their business.
They’d called me in—as clients often do—to get more creativity into their working practices. People often feel this is a kind of spray-on process but quickly discover that the blocks to creativity lie in some very fundamental practicalities.
In the Pharma’s case the numbers were more like 4.5 hours spent in meetings per day, 60 percent effectiveness, average fully loaded costs of $125,000 and 2500 employees. Put them through the formula and there’s an eye-watering 72 million dollars of invaluable time and cost you just poured down the drain.
By any standards that’s a major mistake to be making. And to keep on making.
So yes, it’s a soft issue. But with a rock hard center. It’s like flying through a cloud with a nasty, big mountain hidden inside it. The implications for your financial as well as physical wellbeing can be sudden and drastic.
When I am talking to people who like to differentiate their activities in terms of “hard stuff” and “soft stuff,” I like to describe the work I do particularly with meetings as “the hard-soft stuff.” Soft, in that it’s broadly a people issue. And hard because it’s tough to fix.
When you start to really change meetings, you are tinkering with the culture of the business, and issues don’t come much trickier. It’s easy enough for your business to commit to culture change when you are on a blue-sky-thinking executive-retreat somewhere nice and warm. But visit the workplace a week or two later and you’ll find the “nearly meeting” culture is as stuck as ever. We’ll look at how to change things more effectively a little later in the book.
Nearly Meetings are a worldwide epidemic. And epidemics are something that one of my clients Thomas Breuer knows more than most about. Thomas doesn’t have a golf trophy in his office. Nor one of those toe-curling posters shot against a Hawaiian sunset saying what a real leader is made of.
Thomas Breuer, a physician and epidemiologist by training, is Head of Global Vaccine Development (GVD) at GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines. In the GVD offices there are photographs of African women and their children. They are there to remind all of them of their deadline to license a malaria vaccine and the devastating prospect on mortality in Africa if they fall behind their target. And malaria is just