I can’t begin to tell you how many brain cells I’ve lost over my career attending senseless, wasteful, mind-numbing meetings. When I left one employer after more than 11 years on the job, I calculated that I had attended in excess of 11,000 meetings during my time there – and those were just the regularly scheduled ones that I could easily count. Add in special or unscheduled meetings, and I easily was up around 13,000 meetings in less than 12 years. Some were necessary, but many were futile and wasteful. I’d be surprised if more than 10 percent of them were truly productive.
This all came to mind this morning when I read a new survey by NFI Research that found that 57 percent of business leaders spend 21 percent to 60 percent of their time each week in internal meetings. Some 56 percent of the executives found half of their meetings to be productive, a stunning figure when you consider that these same executives considered the other half of the meetings they attended to be unproductive.
“While meetings are a necessity of businesses, some organizations can tend to go overboard with internal gatherings, which can take away from a customer focus, if not vigilant,” NFI chief executive Chuck Martin said in a press release that announced the survey findings. I hear what Chuck is saying, but I think he’s understating the issue. Structured, tightly focused meetings with a clear purpose and goal can serve a business purpose, but as the great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden once noted, “Never mistake activity for achievement.” Meetings should never be confused with actually taking action and getting things accomplished. At best, they’re a road map to focus the participants on what needs to get done.
I have a million stories about all those meetings that I have given so many brain cells for, but the one that sticks out most is when this brutish tyrant of a boss I was working for told me that the daily afternoon scheduling meeting I ran was TOO efficient and made TOO many decisions TOO early in the day. He took over running the meeting, and of course, he failed to make any real decisions on anything, procrastinating long into the evening and driving everyone crazy. His sterling decision-making abilities drove the company to “encourage” him to take “early retirement” a few years later.
Do you have any great business meeting stories? If so, I’d love to hear about them, either by posting a comment here or sending me an e-mail at jhollon@workforce.com.
Sad to say, there is still a glass ceiling for women trying to rise to the highest ranks in business, but rarely do you get to see just how widespread the problem really is, even in a place that’s reputedly as forward-thinking as California.
According to a recent University of California, Davis, study, only 11.6 percent of executives in California’s 400 largest public companies are women. But, that’s not the surprising part. The big shock is that in Santa Clara County—the heart of future-oriented Silicon Valley—“only 9 percent of companies … have promoted a woman to a top post,” according to a story on the UC Davis study in the San Jose Mercury News. In addition, “only 7 percent of corporate boards include even one woman,” and as the newspaper points out, the study suggests that the role of women in corporations has changed relatively little in decades.
“The numbers are abysmal,” Nicole Woolsey Biggart, dean of the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, told the Mercury News. “What has absolutely dumbfounded me is [that] we look just like the Industrial Belt. We don’t look any different to me. That is the big shock.”
The story goes on to point out that “Some experts in workplace and gender issues say the study’s statistics underscore deep problems that involve social issues, the educational system, and how businesses recruit and treat women.” Added Biggart: “It’s as if women are just invisible. Women [just] aren’t being groomed the way men are being groomed.”
No one should really be shocked that the glass ceiling still exists. We’ve written about some of the reasons a number of times and even highlighted companies like Cigna that are committed to breaking through it. The shock is how thick the barrier still is in Silicon Valley, an area generally lauded for companies with forward-thinking workforce practices. Does it have anything to do with fact that Internet companies are still largely founded and nurtured by engineering nerds, who tend to be male and perhaps more inclined to hang out with—and hire or promote—their techie brethren?
What do we need to do to really, truly break down the glass ceiling that exists for women and minority groups? How can we get more diversity into the executive ranks, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere? Do you have an idea or suggestion? If so, attach a comment here, or e-mail me at jhollon@workforce.com.
Office romances are as inevitable as death, taxes and Southern California freeway traffic. In my experience, it is impossible to try to put a ban on human nature and stop people who work together from getting together.
A New York Times story this week — “Boss’s Memo: Go Ahead, Date (With My Blessing)” the same point: “Despite years of stern warnings about the pitfalls of seeking love in the shadow of the water cooler—touched off by the heightened consciousness of sexual harassment in the 1990s—more workers think dating a colleague is not only acceptable, but logical.”
As anyone who watches the NBC comedy “The Office” knows, public workplace romances are a hot trend right now. A CareerBuilder survey earlier this year found that the number of workers who are keeping an office romance a secret has dropped from 46 percent in 2005 to 34 percent this year. And, about half of the workers surveyed by CareerBuilder say they have dated a co-worker at some point.
The Times story seems to be pegged to past workplace policies that prohibited office romances, but those policies never really did much to stop humans doing what humans will inevitably do. Like the 18th Amendment, which launched Prohibition, all a public ban ever does is drive the behavior underground, therefore giving it the added allure of being ultra-forbidden.
What the Times story doesn’t get into all that much is the pragmatic reason for discouraging office romances: because all too often they go bad. Spoiled office romances leave the participants—and the co-workers around them, who have to live with the bitter, sometimes litigious aftermath—much worse off as a result.
Anyone who values their job knows better than to get involved romantically with someone at work. It can be a career-killer if handled badly (as so many office romances are) and takes the focus off the job at hand: the work. “Fishing off the company pier” has never been a good practice, and although love in the office today may be much more acceptable and commonplace, smart people know that it’s still a star-crossed idea.
Did IBM invent outsourcing, or was it Al Gore? I don’t think IBM did—and my guess is that no one else outside of IBM thinks so, either. So it wasn’t surprising this week when IBM decided to withdraw “a controversial application for a patent on ‘Outsourcing of Services’ that describes a way to make it easier to figure out which jobs to send overseas to countries such as India,” according to a story in the Journal News of Westchester, New York.
If you think it is ridiculous for a company like IBM to try to claim it has a right to patent outsourcing, well, you aren’t alone. As the Journal News story points out, IBM’s decision to withdraw the patent application “followed days of buzz among technology bloggers who criticized IBM’s move to patent a strategy many viewed as obvious.”
IBM has the reputation of being a supremely arrogant company that employs a great many arrogant, condescending people (something I know about firsthand, because I have an arrogant, condescending IBM retiree in my family), but filing for a patent for outsourcing seemed way over the top, even for IBM. Blogger Jim Stroud probably had the best, and briefest, commenton the whole incident, but TechDirt had a pretty good take on it too.
I’ve been traveling this week and am just now getting deep into my stacked-up e-mail, but USA Today had a story a few days ago about the first baby boomer to apply for Social Security retirement benefits–Kathleen Casey-Kirschling of Earleville, Maryland, “generally recognized as the nation’s first boomer (born in Philadelphia on January 1, 1946, at 12:00:01 a.m.) … [who is] taking early retirement at 62.”
It’s not a bad story, but it follows the doom-and-gloom scenario that you have heard over and over again, and the gist of it is this: “The boomer retirements have demographers, actuaries and economists worried as they prepare for an estimated $50 trillion in future obligations over the next 75 years. Social Security will rise from 4 percent to 6 percent of the nation’s economy. Medicare will go from 3 percent to 11 percent.
‘This,’ says Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation, ‘is the single greatest economic challenge of our era.’ ”
I’m already tired of reading about the baby boomer retirement wave, but be prepared for a flood of these kinds of stories over the next 10 years (or more), because it is a topic that has everyone worrying about the “What if?” scenarios if boomers indeed retire on cue and as expected.There are two big issue here: what to do about the worker shortage that will come with the flood of baby boomers rushing into retirement (the “Talent-Shortage Myth” that I have written about on more than one occasion)and, how the federal government will deal with the financial strain placed on Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs that the boomers will be drawing from.
Mark Larson wrote about this topic for Workforce Management back in May 2006 in an intriguing article titled “Global Views on Retirement”. It’s a good story that takes a much more global view of the issue than the USA Today story does. But, none of this changes my view on any of this. Yes, it’s prudent to prepare for the worst if the baby boomers retire en masse as many expect, but don’t be surprised when many, many boomers decide to do it their own way, as usual, and opt to stay on the job for much longer than expected.
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