An enemy abroad is destroying American business -- undermining its productivity, de-motivating its employees, devaluing human capital, producing and indeed encouraging bad decisions.
What is this enemy? It is the culture of meetings.
Like a disease, it reveals itself via symptoms that we can observe as outward signs of an inner problem. Those symptoms are now too obvious, too widespread and too dire to ignore.
We constantly meet and see marketers who are tired and dragging, disillusioned and despairing. They do not look forward to their days, and the consequences of the "in-day" problem are corrosive to their nights and weekends. The power of the disease has robbed them of their vitality, and robbed them of their energy. Instead of striving to re-assert themselves, they compromise; instead of fighting the symptoms, they give in.
Marketers' days are spent almost entirely in meetings. It seems that no subject can be discussed other than in a meeting; no data can be exchanged other than in a meeting; no thinking can be applied other than in a meeting; and no decision can be delivered except in a meeting.
Now this "meeting syndrome" may not seem to you, at first blush, to create any problems in and of itself, so long as we have "good meetings." But the fact that an industry has arisen around the concept of "good meetings" tells us that most of them are bad. Consider just some of the worst problems they cause:
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- The discipline of presenting tightly argued, data supported business cases has been lost. Because meetings are discursive, the cases that are brought to them are less rigorously prepared.
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- The form of presentation to meetings (predominantly PowerPoint) has developed its own, unbusinesslike manner; approximate "bullet points" emphasize visual appeal over logical content.
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- The meeting attendees often arrive unprepared, so time is wasted in aligning all the participants.
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- The loudest, or highest ranking, voice -- rather than the sounded case -- tends to "win" the argument in a meeting.
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- While the presentation that constitutes the input to the meeting is digitally preserved, the decision that represents the output of the meeting is often not recorded.
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- In fact, an "oral culture" develops as a result of the meeting syndrome, so that decisions are made "orally" between individuals (often outside the meeting), with neither the decision itself nor the case for it being retraceable.
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- Consequently, it becomes unclear what was actually executed (versus planned) and so the company that is dominated by the meeting culture ceases to learn because there is no corporate memory from which to learn.
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- The company that ceases to learn becomes ad hoc, and systematic improvement becomes impossible.
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These are dire consequences, and could mean the end of marketing as we know it. Why? Because smart people will leave the arena. They won't subject themselves to endless attendance at meetings with sloppy input and an output decided by the loudest or highest- ranking voice.
They won't tolerate the lack of logic, of rigor and of process. They won't toil all day in meeting rooms just so that they can spend the early mornings and evenings catching up on actually doing business. They won't subject themselves to being recruited into meetings by a piece of software simply because they are "available."
Can we reverse the onset of the symptoms and cure the disease? Fortunately, yes. But it will require accepting the diagnosis and listening to the doctor.
There are three steps to defeating the meeting culture and liberating business.
Bring back the memo. The much maligned business memo is deemed a relic of some bygone age with no relevance to business today. The opposite should be the case. There is tremendous discipline of thought in preparing a business case for anonymous presentation via the circulation of a memo.
We must break the hold of the meeting culture before it destroys American Business.
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The writer must be able to prepare an ironclad, data-supported argument that can carry the day without the cajoling, oral persuasion or emotional manipulation that occurs at meetings. Nor does the process impair human collaboration. The writer will have gathered their supporters by rehearsing the arguments with them beforehand, and will have identified the places where it is strong and the places where it needs further strengthening.
When it gets to the decision maker, the memo demands a thoughtful response. A positive response will trigger immediate action -- no further debate. A conditional response will trigger the organization of the new data or resources or whatever is appropriate to meet the conditions. A negative response must be delivered thoughtfully and cogently -- if the memo is presented that way, it will generate a symmetric response.
The memo is a smart business tool which sharpens arguments and accelerates action.
Apply technology. Marketing, as readers of this column have heard me say so often, is a technology backwater, exiled by the gurus of IT to the dung heap of handcrafts and animal husbandry because we have been unwise enough to reject their offers of efficiency and effectiveness via technology.
A good place to start to apply technology is to replace the useless and unproductive meeting. One of the most prevalent is the meeting to get approval. That can easily be done on-line and in shifted time, relegating this non value-added task from the useful part of the day. Another is the meeting to check status, which can also be automated very easily. As much as 50 percent of any assistant brand manager's time can be saved, just by eliminating these two Stone Age relics.
Marketing is a technology backwater, exiled by the gurus of IT to the dung heap of handcrafts and animal husbandry.
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Focus on metrics. Keep a diary of how much time you spend in meetings. Divide your time into productive (defined as working on strategy, customer or consumer communications, creativity or analysis) and unproductive (defined as non value added time -- meeting to look for data rather than analyzing it, getting approvals, checking status, turning up at someone else's meeting when you could be advancing the project on your own, and so on).
Mark the productive time on your calendar in green and the unproductive in red. Watch in horror as the red space expands to over half of the total space (it does in most of the marketing analyses we conduct). Then develop a way to hand off or eliminate the unproductive time, starting by eliminating all meetings where you are not adding value for others and not receiving value. Do so until you have reclaimed more than 50 percent of the unproductive time on your calendar.
We must end the culture that conducts the marketing process as an endless series of back- to-back meetings, followed by hurried returning of email in the evening and early morning. We must use the time to think about strategy, about consumers and customers, and about brands. We must prioritize our actions appropriately.
The oral culture, the meeting culture, is the thief of time and the killer of sound thought and good decision-making. We must fight back.
Hunter Hastings is managing partner of EMM Consulting Group, which advises companies on how to implement Enterprise Marketing Management, a multi-faceted system for global brand management combining marketing knowledge, best practice processes and training with collaborative software, marketing tools and infrastructure. He can be reached at HunterHastings@EMMConsulting.net
