Don't go (E)

0:00Twenty years ago, I was invited to the big meeting. Every week on Mondays at JPMorgan Chase, there was a meeting of the team that was responsible for one-third of the bank's profits. This meeting consisted of 42 people sitting around a long table, 20 on the side, one at the head, and one at the foot, surrounded by 30 other people sitting in the second row. That meeting cost the bank more than$50 ,000 an hour. And as far as I know, they're still having it. Konnichiwa! It's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:52I got this question from a reader and decided to do an entire episode of Akimbo about it. It explains why I don't go to meetings and how I avoid going to meetings. Here we go. Hey, Seth. This is Thomas from Ireland, a proud Godonite. And I have a question about meetings. You said previously that you save a ton of time daily by not attending meetings. And I was wondering, could you tell us how you work without meetings? For example, what do you do when you need multiple people to discuss something at the same time? Also, do you have any tips for how to stop attending meetings in the meeting-centric culture?

1:25Meetings are a culture, a specific culture, a specific act that industrialized organizations engage in on a regular basis. Meetings are expensive. Meetings are debilitating. And most people who go to meetings for a living will tell you it's one of the worst parts of their job. Why would something like this persist for so long? One of the most famous paintings in the world, something that's been painted over and over again by many artists, is a painting of a meeting, The Last Supper. Meetings are central to many spiritual and religious observances. But we're talking about a very specific sort of meeting right now, the meeting that you might have gone to just before you listened to this, or the one that you have scheduled later in the day.

2:19This is the meeting that might happen on a regular basis. This is the meeting where you recognize all the people who are there. This is the meeting that takes place in person. This is the meeting that starts on the half hour and ends on the half hour. This is the meeting where not very much gets done. There are, of course, a whole slew of other sorts of meetings, one-on-one meetings, which I would rather call conversations. brainstorming meetings that match a specific format. But I'm talking about the general meeting, the all hands-on meeting, the update meeting, the meeting where we go around the room and everyone chimes in, the meeting where the people in the back row are demonstrating that they belong in the back row and taking notes, and the people in the front are speaking up, the meeting where people talk to hear themselves talk, the meeting where many people don't talk so they don't have to risk hearing themselves talk.

3:17If you know what I'm talking about, you're familiar with this sort of meeting. This sort of meeting is probably costing the world economy a trillion dollars a year, not just in the lost time, in the hourly wage multiplied by the number of people, but in the deadening effect, in the idea that it is pushing us to phone it in. But now, of course, we live in a world where we don't have to do this because we can just hop on a Zoom call. And yet, and yet they persist. We live in a world where we don't have to start the meeting at half past the hour. Outlook will let us start it at any time we want. And yet we do it the way we've always done it.

4:02Why is this? Okay, so a bunch of reasons. Try to remember a typical big company office in 1965. Here's the way it would work. A vice president, usually a guy, would want to contact and discuss something with another vice president. This other vice president might have an office 30 feet away. The first executive would call his secretary into his office and dictate a memo. The secretary would type the memo, hand it to the inter-office delivery person, who would bring it three desks down and give it to the secretary of the other executive, who would then bring it into his office and the memo would be complete.

4:45This idea of dueling memos, a slow-moving, cover-your-ass, papered-over system for who said what when, was at the heart of how big companies got or didn't get things done. So you could shake things up if you were Robert McNamara or Mike Bloomberg. You could have a bullpen. You could create a meeting culture where people come together face-to-face and speak their mind. Part of it is an exchange of pheromones, being able to see and smell and engage with someone right in front of you. This can't be underestimated. Mirror neurons, our belief that we can judge other people, the thought of eye contact, our perception of how people dress or sit, the idea of close talkers or interrupters, people who can bring power into the room, all of these things, these very human things, things that go back millions of years, come to the fore in an in-person meeting.

5:48And they lead to displays of power. Who gets to sit where? Who comes to the meeting first? Back when I worked at Spinnaker in the early 80s, we regularly had meetings with seven or eight MBAs all coming to the same meeting. And what we discovered pretty soon is that it was understood that the person who came last was the busiest, was the most important, was the person who couldn't possibly drag themselves away from what they'd been doing to come to the meeting on time. And so, you guessed it, people came later and later. And it wasn't until the chairman of the company bill, put a big bowl on the table and said, last person in has to put a$20 bill in the charity bowl, that the problem was solved.

6:34This power display then reflects back to the idea of fealty, of bowing to power, that if you are going to get on a plane, fly across the country, and sit in a windowless conference room for an hour because your boss asked you to, you're not doing it because an exchange of information is about to occur, other than information about who's in charge. Because, back to the executive with the secretary, if all you wanted to do was give me information, you could have sent me an email. Too many meetings are simply recitations. Recitations don't belong in a real-time environment where we are using up our most precious asset.

7:20That leads to fear. The fear of missing out, the fear of speaking up, the fear of saying something dumb, the fear of being voted down. We've all heard the stories of the board meeting where suddenly the CEO is asked to leave the room and then the board votes to remove him or her. These almost never happen, but the idea that we're going to go to the meeting unprepared can lead to decades of nightmares. It's rehearsed in school, showing up for the exam and going to the wrong room, showing up for the exam being unprepared, going to the meeting and being called on when you're not ready to produce the answer.

8:04Well, why exactly do we need to produce the answer in real time? It's not a game show. That in fact, when we go asynchronous, not all at once, but when we have it ready using a system like Slack, it's easy to show that we could be more productive if we want to be. But that leads to the next idea, safety. Because it's safer to go to a meeting and wait for someone else to take the responsibility. It's safer to go to a meeting and then punt it to the next meeting. that one of the challenges that Slack brings to the organization is if you write it, you wrote it. There it is with your name on it, and everyone knows.

8:49In a meeting, there's plenty of room for deniability. Well, that's not what I really said. In a meeting, there aren't accurate notes of how it all went down. And so something that could be solved in five minutes via some quick backs and forths via email or even a phone call, but particularly something like Slack isn't even solved in an hour of a meeting but we're in a rhythm and the rhythm is this is when the meeting happens this is how the meeting goes and if the new boss showed up and said this 45 minute meeting is now going to be an 8 minute meeting she could make the meeting work in 8 minutes but to do that she would make people uncomfortable because we are comfortable with the rhythm of the meetings that we say we hate because it's safe in there, safer than it would be doing something on our own.

9:46And then commitment signaling. Commitment signaling is part of fealty, but commitment signaling means I dragged myself out of bed to get here to this meeting, or I dragged myself away from my office where I was actually doing productive work to be at this meeting. And these commitments in real time, combined with the idea that we're exchanging pheromones, combined with power display, combined with fealty, combined with our almost Jungian connection to the Last Supper, all of it adds up to the in-person meeting is super special. Rans and Repose wrote a blog post a couple weeks ago about how to do meetings when two or three or four of the people in the meeting are coming in via video call.

10:32And his answer was, get to the meeting early. Set things up in advance. Make sure that you are welcoming these people, these remote workers. I don't think he went nearly far enough. What happens if you have a meeting for eight people, three of whom are coming in by Zoom call, if everyone comes in by Zoom call, if everyone stays in their cube or their office, one computer, one person, and they're all on the same footing. Now we're back to what we were started with. We are back to the idea that faces on the screen are communicating to one another on equal footing. And in that environment, what you will discover is that some people will default to not speaking up.

11:20Some people will speak more than their share. What you will see in that setting is that some people will work hard to make sure that the lighting is good, that they're using a microphone, that they're looking at the screen, that they're not eating while the meeting is going on, that they are fully and emotionally present. And some people look like they're sitting at home watching a football game, eating peanuts with the light streaming in behind them. They have checked out. Meetings give us insight as to who's up and who's down, who's being honored, and who's being disrespected. We live in a meetings culture.

12:02It is very hard to change it, even if you're the boss. My friend Toby, who is the boss, who also knows a lot about how to program computers, did something for his company that had thousands of employees. One weekend, he went in and wrote a script for their company-wide Google calendar. And what he did was he canceled every single regular meeting that was on the calendar. And then he sent an email to everyone in the organization. He said, I just gave you back four hours of your life every week. If that meeting that got canceled is important, feel free to figure out how to replace it with something with more alacrity, with more agility that's going to get the job done.

12:48If you really need to have the meeting, go ahead and put it back on the calendar. But for the rest of us, we just got the freedom to produce more, which means that we also have the responsibility to do something with that time that just got freed up. So culture, culture is every corner of our lives, everywhere we look, but too often we've ignored the culture of meetings. And I don't think you have to be Toby to change it. Figure out a way to upend the worst meeting of your week, to replace it, to cancel it, to adjust it, to figure out the answer to a simple question. What exactly is this meeting for?

13:34If you can answer that question, then you've got a shot at making things better. And if you can't answer that question, don't go to the meeting. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

14:00Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. I love to hear from you. More of us are spending more time at home than ever before. So if you've got a question, I hope you'll take a minute to submit it. Just visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. Hi, Seth. It's Stephanie from Florence, Italy. How can small businesses survive a crisis on a global level?

14:39Because I think that with the coronavirus, it will have lasting impacts on the global economy for at least one year, even more. so I started a business a year ago it's been going pretty well also thanks to your great advice that you're giving and to your encouragement to do the best work and seek the right clients but yeah I don't know how it's how it will be going this year and I was asking myself if you had some thoughts on adapting or advice on how I can adapt and others can adapt to. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Thanks for this question, Stephanie. I want to begin by expressing my concern and care for anyone who is ill right now or has someone in their family who is ill.

15:28We're facing a really tough situation as a worldwide culture, and it's having a dramatic effect on our economy, and it's particularly impacting small businesses. One of the reasons is leverage. The other one is hope. So I'll start with hope first. When you sell to businesses, when you sell to individuals, in both cases, people are buying something they're going to use in the future. Oh, sure, maybe you sell hot dogs at the baseball game for right now, but mostly we're selling something about tomorrow. And so when the world is even more chaotic than unusual, it's harder to get people to plan ahead.

16:09It's harder to get people to stick to their schedule, to focus on their habits and their goals, which means that disruptions happen. And the second half of it is leverage. That because of the stock market, because of low interest rates, because of banks, because of financial maneuvering, more and more organizations are highly leveraged. Why? Here's a simple example from real estate. If you buy a house with cash and it goes up 10 % and you sell it six months from now, you make 10 % on your money. If you buy that same house by putting 10 % down and yet the bank to put up the 90 % and the price goes up 10%, instead of making 10%, you double your money because you use debt to make the transaction work, which means you're taking a bigger risk, but your return goes way up.

17:02And more and more, we are seeing businesses and organizations extending themselves, hoping that that growth, that leverage, that increase in staff or assets will pay back many times over. And one of the problems with the disruption like we are facing now is it puts huge pressure on organizations, big and small, particularly small, who were used to, who were expecting tomorrow's returns to be what yesterday's were but a little bigger, to have to weather an interruption. So what to do about it? Well, the first one is to sit with it and realize stress isn't going to help. That what we need to do is see the people that we serve because they are stressed.

17:51They are in a tough spot, and they want to move forward. The economy is huge. It's bigger than it's ever been. There are 7 billion human beings active in this economy, all connected all around the world. Somewhere, somebody needs help. They might not need what they needed a month ago or six months ago, and that's the advantage a small company has. Because A, you can actually see your customers. You know them by name. You can see the entire list and understand it. And B, unlike a giant organization, you can shift. You can shift the way you speak to people. You can shift what you offer people. And that's why we went into small business in the first place, to be part of a community, to help complete the circle.

18:40And so there's the opportunity. The opportunity is to figure out how to create enough slack in your system that you're not completely stressed out about missing payroll. And at the very same time, figure out what your audience, the people who already trust you, actually need and give them that. Day by day, we will recover. Day by day, things will get better. And they will get better faster if we take a deep breath and get back to first principles, which is helping people get what they want and what they need. Here's to good health for everyone who's listening. Go make your ruckus. Thanks.