“Meetings Should be Fun, but...”

More than six feet tall, DAVID PEARL makes for an imposing presence as he draws on his experiences in the creative sphere, including theatre, to explain how businesses can become more effective. He has been an opera singer –starting at age nine – a performer, an advertising copywriter, and a writer for film and television. His present career began in the mid-1990s, when he was asked by a professional services firm to prepare a personal and professional development programme for its top 1,000 employees. Since then he has worked on nearly 800 similar projects for clients such as McKinsey, GSK, BP, Unilever, Oracle, Dell and Disney. Pearl has now turned author with a book Will There Be Donuts? Start a Business Revolution One Meeting at a Time, on both the utility and futility of meetings, which will be out in end-May. In India recently, he spoke with BT’s SHAMNI PANDE. Edited excerpts:

There are many books on meetings already. What made you take up the subject?

If you are in a job where you have to devote at least three hours to meetings daily, a back-of-theenvelope calculation will show you spend nearly 82 days a year in meetings alone. Stretch this beyond a year, and it amounts to nine years, six months and three days of your working life. Yes, I have actually worked hard to figure that out.

I know managers who are involved in nearly seven hours of cross-country conference calls daily. Think about the time and energy a company invests in meetings so that it can come up with creative, innovative solutions to its problems. These involve people who are highly accomplished, well-read and intelligent, yet many do not get the best out of meetings.

I once went to one of the top accounting firms and got off at the wrong floor where hundreds of people were glued to a screen – all in a meeting. I went back into the lift and again managed to get onto another wrong floor with the same visual treat. Floor after floor, people were engrossed in meetings. These have become almost a modern form of slavery – an epidemic.

Yet meetings are critical. I was once asked to intervene in a very large firm and the key issue I addressed was the time its employees spent on meetings, which were mostly not leading to any results.

You almost challenge yourself and your readers by asking:‘Is this more interesting than food or sex?’

Yes. Meetings have to be fun. They consume so much of one’s working life and vital business time. Often, people tend to keep quiet even when they are bored at meetings. In the performing arts world, where I grew up, this is not done. There you have direct feedback, what with viewers heckling and even throwing things. So, it is important for people who call meetings to be clear about the context as well as the objective, and make them as much fun as possible.

But often, aren’t the very leaders who bring in people like you responsible for holding too many meaningless meetings?

Absolutely. I once attended a lunch meeting and watched an Australian CEO who wanted to say something which should have taken five minutes. But he rattled on, and three of the people attending the meeting fainted, as it was an outdoor meet on a particularly hot day.

I highlight this aspect in my book: ‘They’ are the people causing the problems… you will have to take the initiative if you want to change things.