Will there be Donuts?: Start a business revolution one meeting at a time. David Pearl
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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 realise 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 per cent 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 on your doormat clamouring 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 rubbish 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: Less 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 synchronised 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, practised their dance at home in their web cams, texted each other where and when to meet. Everything has been prepared and performed at arms’ 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 galvanise whole towns into staging water pistol ambushes through social media.
That said, I am doubtful about whether all this supposed digital connectivity has actually brought us closer as human beings.
I met a London cabbie the other day. He was a chatty guy but was looking subdued. ‘Just had a lady in my cab and asked her, “How are you today?” She gave me a filthy look and shouted, “I am married, you know,” as though fending off an attack.’ Apparently this is happening to him once a week. A most basic human exchange is taken as a threat of violence.
America, the most netted-up nation on earth, is increasingly the land of the loner. In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert Putnam shows how Americans at least have become increasingly disconnected. Family dinners have apparently dropped by 43 per cent in 25 years; people are 35 per cent less likely to have friends over to their houses; and the bowling alleys of the USA are increasingly used by individuals competing against themselves.
Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn we are accruing vast numbers of ‘friends’ we’ll never meet. In many cases live meeting is actively discouraged. Even my eight-year-old son knows not to show his face on screen and to use a coded name when talking to his mates in Seattle or Brazil about the latest Lego craze.
It’s all very flattering to have a huge network, but drain the digital bath of drive-by acquaintances and people trying to sell you something, and how many real relationships do you find?
The other day someone I haven’t seen for 20 years – and barely knew back then – waved to me at a concert and wished me Happy Birthday. How the hell did she know? Apparently my Wall told her. Walls don’t just have ears any more. They have mouths. I didn’t feel flattered. I felt stalked.
Clearly there is a dissonance between the media we have available to connect with others and our success in using them.
Nowhere does technology facilitate nearly meeting better than our busy, busy businesses. Co-workers email each other rather than look around the computer screen and talk. Meeting tables come ready plumbed for laptops, so face time and screen time inevitably compete.
I am looking forward to the time when someone recommends the face-to-face meeting as a wild new innovation. I suspect it’s not far away. Especially when people are making such a fuss about new technologies which are – drum roll – in 3D. Our lives are in 3D, if only you’d rip your eyes away from your 2D screen long enough to notice that!
I’m struck by how we are using all sorts of very tactile, kinetic verbs – ping, prod, tweet, twang – to describe interactions that are totally disembodied. How funny that we talk about using technology to stay in touch when there’s no touching at all. OK, I give my Apple the occasional loving stroke, but …
If I am sounding Luddite,