this isn’t why you picked up this book. You probably just thought if you could make the meetings you attend less dull, boring, irrelevant, and downright irritating, your life would be better. That if you could release a few hours from your working week you could be way more productive. That if the meetings you did have were genuinely helpful, inspiring even, it would be a blessing.
And you’d be right.
My point is that if we and millions of sufferers like us manage that together, we will have done more to improve the world than all those grand-sounding vision statements put together.
When you add it up—and we will—you see that there are billions of hours out there waiting to be reclaimed and turned into value.
I admit it doesn’t seem a particularly glamorous or epic way to change the world. I am reminded of the final series of The West Wing when the old regime is coming to the end and the stalwart chief of staff CJ is being head-hunted by a Bill Gates-alike to become the new head of his humanitarian foundation. He asks her what she would do to make the world a better place. “Build highways in Africa,” she blurts. With roads you can move medicines, boost productivity, increase communications, revolutionize markets. Roads aren’t the glamorous answer the billionaire was expecting, but if CJ really thinks new highways will do the trick, he is willing to back her.
I feel pretty much the same way about meetings. To us as individuals they are just a feature of our daily work diary. But seen in macro they are how we exchange information, do business, invent the future, make friends, heal rifts. Doing them better is important for our businesses and for our world.
So not glamorous, but a heroic adventure nonetheless. Heroes, remember, are not extraordinary people. They are ordinary people like you and me who occasionally manage to break out of the routine and do extraordinary things.
So will there be donuts? It’s a question being asked in offices, conferences, seminars, pitches, and presentations all over the world right now. Here are some others. See if they sound familiar. If you have found yourself asking any of these, you have come to the right place.
Is this meeting EVER going to END?
If you’ve ever been to a Wagner opera you know you can drift off for a nice little nap and when you wake up, nothing seems to have happened. What I call “Wagner Meetings” are the same, except the guy with the beard and the horns doesn’t have a big spear but a whiteboard marker. Wagner meetings, like Wagner operas, are meant to be long. The longer they are, the more important they seem. Which is why they go on and on. Think Italian roadworks. No “work” is actually happening. They are a way of avoiding work. The whole idea is to drag things out as long as possible and then retire on a good pension before anyone notices.
Where did my day/week/year go?
Mushroom Meetings. They propagate in your diary like fungus on a rotten tree stump. Is it an airborne spore? Is it a virus? Who knows? But turn away and there they are when you open your Outlook in the morning. There are so many of them that there doesn’t seem to be any room for actual work. This is particularly true in business, where any and every issue needs to be marked by a meeting. It becomes an addiction. A variation of this phenomenon is the Stonehenge Meeting. Like the stones on Salisbury Plain, they have been there since the dawn of time but no one really knows what they are for.
Is this work, or politics?
If you are wondering this, you are probably in what I call “The Party Political un-Broadcast.” These meetings are like those short “infomercials” that are inserted into the TV schedule during election periods. With three important differences. These meetings are all about politics but don’t warn you from the start. They aren’t short. And very often the politics is not broadcast. On the contrary, it’s never mentioned. But everything in the meeting is actually about political leverage and personal power-play. Oh, and one important extra difference. You can’t vote these people out.
Is someone—anyone—ever going to make a decision?
Be very afraid. You are in what I call a DMZ. Like the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea, but far more scary. The Decision-Missing Zone. In a DMZ you’ll find yourself wondering—didn’t we decide this last week, and why are we talking about it again? Or why is it that we decide things in meetings and then un-decide them outside the meetings?
What am I doing here?
Welcome to the disorienting and very common Lilliput Syndrome that kicks in when meetings just aren’t relevant to you. I named it after the scene in Gulliver’s Travels where the hero (in this case you) wakes up in an alien land. It’s full of little people, speaking a weird language. This world has nothing to do with you, but when you try to leave you discover you are tied down and unable to move. You’re a prisoner!
This syndrome is equally common when the meeting isn’t relevant to you and when you are not relevant to it!
If I covered myself in gasoline and lit a match would anyone notice?
Ah, yes, Invisible Man syndrome. They don’t see you. And you cannot get your voice heard either. Partly because there’s no gap in the conversation. Beware, you may be stuck in a GabFest. These are particularly popular in organizations which confuse airtime with importance and complexity with cleverness.
Are you there? Can you hear me? Hello?
They discouraged you from traveling. They increased the workload. And then they proudly introduced you to an integrated, multi-nodal tele-presence system with lots of buttons and half a mile of cable sprouting from it. Now they expect you to do real business across time zones and languages with people you’ve never met. But you spend your time staring into a blank screen or listening to telephone hiss …
Did I drift off?
One client I worked with confided guiltily that he fell asleep in a meeting. I told him that was common and nothing to be ashamed of. “You don’t understand,” he continued. “It was a one-to-one meeting. And I was leading it!” You may not have actually bored yourself into a coma recently but, let’s face it, meetings can be exceptionally and unremittingly, unremarkably, unspeakably DULL.
You wouldn’t invite people to your house and bore them to death. This is partly because if your friends found you dull, they’d tell you. Or avoid you. For some reason, dullness is entirely accepted in business meetings. In some places it even passes for professionalism. It’s like a piece of spinach stuck in the front teeth of Enterprise that no one’s talking about. John Cleese memorably pointed out that in business people tend to confuse somber with serious—the more tedious you are, the more worthy of respect. It’s an old-fashioned idea. And from what I’ve seen even the most serious businesses have had enough. At an event I recently organized, we asked a leadership team to help a social eco-activist clear a children’s park of rocks. When I looked in on them mid-morning they were happily tossing chunks of granite to each other with their bare hands. And singing! As the CFO confided to me later, “We’d rather be in a chain gang than in a meeting.”
My meetings are fine, but could they be amazing?
Well, hello there. If this is on your mind, you may be
