Will there be Donuts?: Start a business revolution one meeting at a time
The very word ‘meeting’ conjures up images of time wasted in badly lit, airless offices. Of sitting around tables, unsure why you are there & wishing you were somewhere else. The only perk the sweet snack on a plate in the middle of the table.‘Will there be Donuts?” helps you reclaim your working life and make meetings 100% more effective.“Will There Be Donuts?” is about a big mistake that almost all companies are going to make this year. And the next. And the one after that. We’ll call it nearly meeting.It happens the length and breadth of the business world, from boardroom to shop floor.‘Will There Be Donuts?’ is business expert David Pearl’s first book and he draws on his 2 decades of consulting with some of the biggest companies in the world to re-educate the reader on how to hold meetings and, crucially, how to make them great.His client list is a who’s who of FTSE and NYSE names and they seek his advice on how to engage employees at every level to make their meetings more efficient, effective and engaging.His list of achievements in the field includes:• Identifying £30million of savings by changing ineffective meetings at GSK.• Persuading the CEO of Skandia International to saw through his boardroom table.• Showing the Department of Work & Pensions that having your mobile phone on in a meeting could be seen as a good thing.At every level of an organisation, not just the very top. if your meetings are ineffective then it’s likely that your business is too. “Will There Be Donuts?” will reinvigorate you as a person and as an employer/employee.Consider the following:You are in a role which requires you to attend three hours of meetings a day. Let’s say you’d score those meetings 70% effective. Let’s also imagine there are 100 people like you in the company and that your average wage is £60k.You personally just wasted 5 whole weeks in meeting time this year. Your company lost a combined 2500 days of productivity; that’s the equivalent of 11 person-years costing the company £675,000. What’s more, if you were to continue at this rate for a conventional career, you’d be burning a total of 9 years, 6 months and 3 days of your working life. All for the sake of some ineffective meetings.“Will There Be Donuts?” will help you reclaim your working life.
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For Joanna, Elsa and Zachary
Contents
Dedication
4 THE SEVEN BASIC MEETING TYPES
NEXT STEPS: DON’T LET HARRY MISS SALLY
Copyright
About the Publisher
Back in March 2011, at the earliest stages of the book, my editor Nick Canham called a meeting. He wanted to get his colleagues at HarperCollins interested in the book; enrolled, excited. Clearly he did OK, or we wouldn’t be here now. But I was curious. What was it that had brought these hardened publishing professionals to the meeting? Was it the importance of the subject? The irrefutable logic? The exquisite prose style?
I told them I’d bring donuts, said Nick.
That gave us our title. And it gives us our starting point. If the donuts are the most interesting thing about your meetings, this book is for you.
It’s something we often say, but don’t always mean. In this case I really am pleased to meet you, if only by the rather arm’s length medium of this book.
My intention in writing Will There Be Donuts? is to make the world a more interesting place. Or rather that you will. I am just going to help you make it fun.
And we are going to do it one great meeting at a time.
I am guessing 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, revolutionise 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 rather 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 promotional promos that are inserted into the TV schedule during election periods. With three important differences. These meetings are all about politics but have no warning sign at 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.
