Will there be Donuts?: Start a business revolution one meeting at a time

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* (#ulink_d9bfc9e8-1ef9-57fd-97bf-063a92e0e59f) 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 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 have become increasingly disconnected. Family dinners have apparently dropped by 43 percent in 25 years; people are 35 percent less likely to have friends over to their houses; and bowling alleys across the country 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, I don’t mean to. Technology enables businesses to cut down on the time and cost involved in physically bringing their people together. And let’s not forget, this is also in the interests of the planet, minimizing the carbon carnage of those unnecessary international flights.

But virtual meetings are—as their name plainly advertises—not real. They encourage us to almost, just about, nearly meet. It’s a real challenge to make and keep real human connection with disembodied voices or truncated torsos across continents and time zones. We’ll look later in the book at how to make the best of the medium and “create intimacy at a distance.”

Bottom line: just because technology can connect us, it doesn’t mean we do really connect.

A colleague told me a poignant story about a friend of his, a top-flight corporate lawyer who spends her time jetting around the world, constantly in touch with clients on one of her two BlackBerries by text, BMS, email, and MMS. Recently, on a fevered dash from one meeting to another, she flipped her car and was nearly killed. Staggering out of the wreckage and just glad to be alive, she reached for her phone to tell her loved ones that she was all right and realized she had no one to call.

The ability to really connect is natural, but requires practice or it withers, with predictably negative effects on both our business and personal lives.

We nearly meet because … that’s what we want to do

Let’s face it, other people are hard work. They have this annoying habit of not agreeing with us. They have their own ideas and agendas. They don’t, for some reason, think we are always marvelous. They are complex, demanding and just plain tiring.

Why would we want to meet them? Better by far to pretend to meet. Nod but don’t hear. Smile but don’t mean it. Keep “them” on the outside and save your energy.

When I am not in London—or on a plane—I spend as much time as I can in rural Italy. As a lifelong city dweller I am acutely aware of how few people you see on a normal day in the north Italian countryside. The scarcity of the people seems to put them into high relief. You notice them. They notice you. Your eyes meet. You raise your hand. You briefly discuss the ripeness of the tomatoes, the likelihood of rain, the latest aches and pains and whether Juventus are likely to scrape through this season without pouring shame on the team/the region/the nation. It is the sort of setting which encourages connections with others. London is another story. As I take the plane, taxi, or tube back into the center of the metropolis, I feel my mind becoming overwhelmed by potential connection. There are just too many people. I start to screen them out, like the iris of your eye shutting down to protect you from a blast of bright sunlight. Within minutes I am in a bubble where I can walk through a crowd of people on Oxford Street and see—no one.

This ability of the mind to filter out information is a key to our development as a species—and our survival as modern humans. The ability selectively to screen out background sounds so we hear what is being said to us is key to our communication. It is similarly crucial to our survival that we can separate the features of a landscape we don’t need to know about (the green stuff) from the things we might need to know about (like a saber-toothed tiger).

There is growing concern at the connection between the use of digital music players and fatal accidents. The London authorities have started talking about “iPod zombies” and San Francisco has spent millions on a media blitz warning against the screening-out effect of earphones. “Do you want Beethoven to be the last thing you hear?” one lugubrious ad asks the city’s joggers.

We nearly meet because … we confuse efficient and effective

As the doyen of management consultants Peter Drucker once said, “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Many companies are focusing on making their meetings more efficient. That doesn’t mean they are any more effective.

I have a friend who is a world-class management consultant. I’ll call him Ron—not his real name—for the sake of discretion and to prevent his clients taking out a contract on me. He has a great example of a client who has become exquisitely efficient and wildly ineffective at the same time. It’s all to do with paper. The client generates hundreds of thousands of sheets of contracts and agreements at each of their branches every week. The company has had to become supremely talented at moving all this paper around as well as storing and retrieving it. They have invested in ergonomically designed paper-carrying equipment (I think this means strong suitcases), transportation systems, and document logging. They were thrilled with themselves until Ron asked the unasked question: “Why do you need all this paper?” They were ready for this. “Because the regulator requires that we get our customers’ signature.” Ron pressed on: “Yes, but why does that signature have to be on paper?” he asked, no doubt making a lifelong enemy of the Logistics Director. In this digital age there are many legally acceptable forms of signature, of which a mark on paper is only one. There’s a tick on a form, a digitally scanned signature, a thumbprint, even the iris in your eye. Ron’s point was that while the paper is being dealt with efficiently, the more effective course of action would be to invest a tiny fraction of the time, energy, and money into talking with the regulator and finding a paperless solution. Efficient, yes. Effective, no!

I have seen efficient meetings—meticulously planned, immaculately laid out and run perfectly to time—that had no positive effect whatever. (We’ll look a little later in the book at how to redesign meetings so that they are both.) These are classic “nearly meetings.” And they are going to be happening all over the world today and every day. The people are present, or appear to be; the room or the call/video conference suite is booked, the agenda prepared, and yet no connection in a true sense actually happens.

We nearly meet because … we forget there’s an alternative

Finally, the most pervasive reason of all, we nearly meet so much because we don’t realize, remember, or believe we can really meet.

I am reminded of a leadership programme we were involved in delivering to the top echelons of a major European financial services company. It was held in a spectacular castle on the outskirts of Paris. At the end of our three days together the participants were talking about what they had gotten out of the experience. One man was asked what he had learned. I knew that this self-confessed “numbers guy” was earmarked for great things, but he looked terribly awkward as he said his piece.

“Every Monday I have a meeting with the people who report to me and I usually just like to get on with it. I don’t see any need to talk to them about themselves, how they are or what they’re up to. I am a doer and I see this kind of thing as a waste of time. What I didn’t realize until now, though, was that there was a real person sitting opposite me.”

He then sat down, looking somewhat apologetic and puzzled by an insight that was at once so mundane and yet so far-reaching—not just for his career but beyond.

I think this client spoke for all of us who crash through the day, intent on getting things done, and forgetting to connect with the people around us. We forget they are people, not just “functions.”

It’s because of stories like this that I’ve become curious about meetings. We go into meetings disconnected not only from others but also from our own thoughts, feelings, bodies, and our true nature.

Realizing that nearly meeting is mostly what you are doing is a great first step to start really meeting.

The True Cost of Nearly Meeting

Nearly meeting is exacting a huge cost not just on us and our businesses but on our planet.