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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.

Is someone – anyone – ever going to make a decision?

Be very afraid. You are in what I call a DMZ. Like the demilitarised zone that separates North and South Korea, but far more scary. The Decision-Missing Zone. In a DMZ you’ll find yourself wondering – didn’t we decide this last week and why are we talking about it again? Or why is it that we decide things in meetings and then un-decide them outside the meetings?

What am I doing here?

Welcome to the disorientating and very common Lilliput Syndrome that kicks in when meetings just aren’t relevant to you. I named it after the scene in Gulliver’s Travels where the hero (in this case you) wakes up in an alien land. It’s full of little people, speaking a weird language. This world has nothing to do with you, but when you try to leave you discover you are tied down and unable to move. You’re a prisoner!

This syndrome is equally common when the meeting isn’t relevant to you and when you are not relevant to it!

If I covered myself in petrol and lit a match would anyone notice?

Ah, yes, Invisible Man syndrome. They don’t see you. And you cannot get your voice heard either. Partly because there’s no gap in the conversation. Beware, you may be stuck in a GabFest. These are particularly popular in organisations which confuse airtime with importance and complexity with cleverness.

Are you there? Can you hear me? Hello?

They discouraged you from travelling. They increased the workload. And then they proudly introduced you to an integrated, multi-nodal tele-presence system with lots of buttons and half a mile of cable sprouting from it. Now they expect you to do real business across time zones and languages with people you’ve never met. But you spend your time staring into a blank screen or listening to telephone hiss …

Did I drift off?

One client I worked with confided guiltily that he fell asleep in a meeting. I told him that was common and nothing to be ashamed of. ‘You don’t understand,’ he continued. ‘It was a one-to-one meeting. And I was leading it!’ You may not have actually bored yourself into a coma recently but, let’s face it, meetings can be exceptionally and unremittingly, unremarkably, unspeakably DULL.

You wouldn’t invite people to your house and bore them to death. This is partly because if your friends found you dull, they’d tell you. Or avoid you. For some reason, dullness is entirely accepted in business meetings. In some places it even passes for professionalism. It’s like a piece of spinach stuck in the front teeth of Enterprise that no-one’s talking about. John Cleese memorably pointed out that in business people tend to confuse sombre with serious – the more tedious you are, the more worthy of respect. It’s an old-fashioned idea. And from what I’ve seen even the most serious businesses have had enough. At an event I recently organised, we asked a leadership team to help a social eco-activist clear a children’s park of rocks. When I looked in on them mid morning they were happily tossing chunks of granite to each other with their bare hands. And singing! As the CFO confided to me later, ‘We’d rather be in a chain gang than in a meeting.’

My meetings are fine, but could they be amazing?

Well, hello there. If this is on your mind, you may be one of those rare people who don’t try to correct their lives, but just make them even better, more effective/engaging/value-creating. You’re not a Fixer but an Enhancer. Someone that goes to the doctor not because you are unfit, but because you want to be fitter. In a hypnosis course I once took, everyone (including me) had gone there to solve some life problem or other. All except one man. When the time came for him to state why he’d come, he blinked once or twice through his pebble glasses and asked the instructor, ‘Can you hypnotise me so that every time I see my wife I love her even more?’ This is an Enhancer’s answer.

If one or more of these situations seems familiar, I wrote this book for you.

You’ll learn (in section 1) that you are not alone. Millions of people are suffering, often in silence, as poor meetings – I call them ‘nearly meetings’ – compromise their working lives.

In section 2 we’ll flip the coin and see the value of really meeting. Equipping you to really meet is what this book is about. That includes helping you understand the Anatomy of Meetings and how to design them better (in section 3), the seven essential meeting types and how to have them (section 4), and then, in section 5, we’ll look at how you change meeting culture in your business and get the changes to stick without losing friends – or your job!

This is not a how to book in the normal sense. We already know how to meet. As you’ll see, it’s an inherent human skill. I like to think this is more of a how NOT TO book, reminding us to stop doing things which get in our way.

Like most smart working, better meetings are about doing less of what you know doesn’t work but keep doing anyway.

Ethan Hunt: This is going to be difficult.

Mission Commander Swanbeck: Mr Hunt, this isn’t mission difficult, it’s mission impossible. ‘Difficult’ should be a walk in the park for you.

Mission: Impossible II (2001)

I love those movie scenes where the unlikely hero, or even better a group of misfits, discover why they have been called to adventure and what their mission is. A chap from the ministry with a pipe points at a map or model explaining why this has never been attempted before. Or a shadowy spymaster describes a new target on grainy film as a cine projector whirs in the background.

I feel we are at that point as we gather for our adventure into, around, over and under the Weird World of Meetings.

Here is a bit of a preview of what awaits us, how to prepare and what essentials to pack.

It’s a Jungle Out There, So Stay Alert

There are lots of books on meetings which are duller than the meetings they are trying to improve. I have no intention of adding to that list.

It is a jungle out there. But it’s a jungle of dullness.

So here’s the question I’ll be asking myself throughout – it works well for meetings too. ‘Is this more interesting than food or sex?’

Let me explain.

Most people I meet in business could be having more fun. One reason for this is they keep quiet when they are bored. It is considered rude to speak up or leave the room. So they suffer in silence.

It’s all a lot less polite in the performing arts world I grew up in. Stand-up comedians know instantly when they have lost their audience. And if they take no notice they’ll get talked over, heckled and eventually have bottles thrown at them. That’s what you call direct feedback.

It’s an honourable tradition in theatre.

Picture yourself in an 18th-century opera house. Opera was then what the cinema is to us today – the most dramatic, sensational, sound- and music-filled experience available. And to ensure it stayed that way, opera houses were constructed as a series of ‘boxes’. One side of your box faced the stage and the other opened to drinking, dining and canoodling facilities when and if the stage action became dull. This meant opera audiences voted with their feet (and other parts of the body) if an opera failed to engage them. This resulted in operas that were eye-catchingly, heart-snaringly full of delight, intrigue, dance, storms, shipwrecks, divine skulduggery and human frailty. It was only when theatres started to be constructed in serried rows, where it was difficult to leave when you were bored, that things started to get boring.

If we were actually meeting I’d suggest the same thing to you as I do to my clients. If anyone is going on too long, we use a thumbs-up signal which means ‘I got it, move on.’ It’s visible. It’s immediate. It’s kinder than the hand slicing across the windpipe action that people often use to indicate you are overrunning.

As we are not in direct contact, can I just suggest that if I lose your interest, you put the book down, stretch your legs and grab a bite?^* The sex thing is entirely up to you.

If I bore myself, I will do the same. Deal?

Some useful terms

Here are some words and phrases I’ll be using as we voyage into Meeting Land and their meanings.

‘Meetings’

I am not going to restrict the book to formal meetings of eight or so people sitting around a big wooden desk. We’ll look at meetings as small as two and as large as 1500. We’ll focus on live meetings but include virtual ones. A lot of my clients are wrestling with virtual meetings currently. The bottom line is that everything you need to do for a live meeting, you need to do even more for a virtual one.

‘Your meetings’

When I say ‘your’ meetings I am including those you lead and those you attend. When we look at them from the highest level (and we will) they are indeed all ‘your’ meetings – whether they feel like it or not.

‘They’

‘They’ are the people who are causing the problems. They are not going to read this book, which is why you will have to do it for them. They sat in the middle rows at school and were proud of their pencil cases. They are the boring folk. Not us. Let’s keep it that way.

‘Clients’

The ideas in this book are based on many years working with businesses around the world. I have mentioned some people by their real names. Others I have disguised, as they are still operating as meeting revolutionaries in their organisations and I don’t want to blow their cover. I will just refer to them by their first name and role, for example Ron the Consultant or Dominique the CEO. You are also going to be hearing from people outside business like Dame Barbara Stocking, the Head of Oxfam UK, the environmentalist Ashok Khosla, the scholar and activist Jim Garrison and others. These are people who have a stake in real meetings that goes beyond business and out into the wider world.

‘Tried and tested techniques’

All the tips, tricks and tools I offer in this book have been rigorously tested in the field. Well, nearly all. I couldn’t help myself. I have included some which have never been tried and could explode without warning. I know that won’t bother an adventurer like you. Indeed, I am hoping you are going to go further than I have, being more daring and experimental. Just let me know what you discover on your journey. I’ll be waiting in keen anticipation for your report on david@willtherebedonuts.com.

‘Business’

I refer a lot to business in this book, but that doesn’t mean we need to restrict ourselves to commerce. The work here can be and has been applied to public sector organisations, government, NGOs and even schools. Will There Be Donuts? is relevant wherever two or more people are meeting together in a world that’s getting busier by the day. In writing the book I assumed that people in business also have home lives (I know that’s a bit of a bold assumption) and will find a lot of these techniques useful in personal life as well.

‘The Arts’

You’ll see I often refer to the Arts or Performing Arts. This is the point where I have to put my hand up (you can’t see me, but it really is up) and confess I am a business outsider. That’s probably why people call me into their businesses. My background is the Arts. All my life I have been involved (as performer, director, writer, producer) in creating experiences for people in music, theatre, opera, TV and film.

I didn’t expect to be working in the business world, and if one of the world’s leading consulting companies hadn’t asked me to help them stage a spectacular operatic team-building experience in the early nineties (more of that later), I might not have been.

I have spent a couple of decades wandering round in a world I wasn’t trained to understand and have discovered how wonderful it is to be an outsider on the inside. It allows you to be permanently puzzled about why perfectly normal people behave in such peculiar ways when they are at work.

People ask me, ‘When did you leave the performing arts?’ and I answer that I didn’t. To me businesses are theatre and meetings are their stage. Some of the companies I know are every bit as dramatic and bloody as the schlockiest opera. Businesses run on creativity. Creative ventures need to be businesslike. Shakespeare, remember, was an astute businessman and property magnate. The worlds may appear very different, but their drives are often the same.

Stick Together

In the quintessential heist film Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Danny (George Clooney) asks Rusty, the fixer character played by Brad Pitt, what he thinks is required to pull off the impossible casino robbery. Brad doesn’t answer what, but who. ‘Off the top of my head, I’d say you’re looking at a Boeski, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever.’

The lesson is simple. If you are attempting something ambitious – and changing meeting culture is definitely that – then you need a diverse crew that’s as determined (or insane) as you are. ‘Find hungry Samurai,’ as they say in Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai.

Dorothy needed the Tin Man, Scarecrow, Lion, assorted munchkins, a couple of fairies and a small dog to make it to Oz. Gather some like-spirited but unlike-minded allies to join you on the adventure. People who share your irritation at the way meetings are held currently and who think sufficiently differently from you to make sure you come up with some unusual solutions.

Also, if you are in a corporate setting and you are not in a leadership position, ideally you should enrol someone who is, to provide a ‘licence to operate’ and some high-level ‘air cover’ for when you do. I encourage clients to put a ‘dotted line’ around a few months during which people have permission to try new things and, if necessary, make mistakes without reprisal.

This doesn’t mean you can’t operate solo, but all good 007s have their Ms to watch their backs and their Qs to provide them with the baddy-neutralising pen and amphibious getaway car.

What you should bring with you

In the saddle bag of the Real Meeting revolutionary you won’t find posters, HR charts or books on management. They are not interested in knowing about real meetings. They are determined to have them.

I like to recommend that every self-respecting Real Meeting-ista carries the following must-have pieces of equipment:

A chainsaw (heavy duty)

One pair of secateurs

Semtex or equivalent industrial-strength plastic explosive

And a glue gun

You need something as dramatic as a chainsaw to slice through the dense undergrowth of ‘nearly meetings’ and clear a giant hole to let the light in. Secateurs are essential to shape and refine the few meetings you actually do have. The bad meeting habits of your colleagues are hard as concrete and have deep foundations. You’ll need something as strong as Semtex to detonate those. And you need a glue gun to make sure the changes you make in meeting practice actually stick.

Clients who knew I was writing this book wanted me to pass on a couple of additional must-have items; this time not metaphorical ones.

Rubber Chicken

Virginie was so fed up with people arriving late at her meetings she borrowed a large plastic chicken toy from her pet dog and presented it to the colleague who arrived last. The team loved the idea and a new ritual was born. Today any team member who dares to arrive after the agreed start time has to keep the chicken prominently on their office desk until the next monthly meeting as a silent and potent mark of public shame. It’s a playful and effective deterrent.

Plastic Water Bottle (empty!)

Recycling-minded companies are finding all sorts of uses for discarded plastic water bottles; waterproof fleeces, jewellery, solar heating panels, insulation, desk tidies. Alain and Bill, two resourceful clients who both have a scientific background, discovered a wonderful new application of the empty water bottle to improve attention in meetings, as Bill explained:

Alain always used to punch me in the arm when I lost attention and drifted off into working on my laptop. And I used to return the favour. But Alain is a big fellow and a punch from him really used to hurt. One day I had just finished drinking a bottle of water and saw him on his BlackBerry, and before I thought about it I bounced the empty bottle off his head. It was just as effective as the punch and much less effortful for both of us. And it’s catching on. Last week Martine, another colleague, launched one across the room at Francesca who was tapping away at SameTime. Now when we meet as a leadership team we always make sure we have an empty water bottle to hand.

‘Good luck. You are going to need it.’

I was at dinner in Italy with a career US diplomat. As you might expect from someone who has being doing that job for 20 years, he was a charming, engaging and calm individual. Until I mentioned I was writing this book.

‘Meetings! Meetings have been the bane of my career. They are pointless! A complete waste of time!!’ He was standing by this point and, I swear, waving a bread stick. ‘I say NO to all meetings now. All except one. I do one meeting a week just to remind myself why I don’t go to any others!!!’.

He eventually calmed down, but when I left the dinner he took me to one side. ‘Good luck,’ he said, like he was sending me into Da-Nang on a one-way mission. ‘You’re going to need it.’

He does have a point. If you really mean to change the way you meet, you are going to be messing with the culture of the business and the deep-seated habits of its employees. You’re going to discover that very often the meetings are not the problem, they are a symptom of the problem. You are going to be upsetting the status quo. It could get messy.

Great meetings are a noble destination. The question is, are you prepared to do what it takes to get there? [CUE: stirring action movie soundtrack with snare drums and lone bugle. Distant at first but building to the end of this chapter.]

We’re not looking for trainers (training coming as it does from the Latin to drag) but for undercover agents of change.

This isn’t about moving the paper clips around. It’s about setting off a meeting revolution in your business. And that’s going to need meeting revolutionaries. We are looking for people who want to make a difference and understand you may need to be a bit naughty to achieve that. It’s for people who want to see a real difference in their meetings and for that effect to last. (How am I doing in enrolling you, by the way? This wouldn’t be a bad way to set intent and engage people at the beginning of a meeting. Particularly if you add a warning …)

But, before you volunteer, there’s something you should know. It’s a dangerous world out there in Nearly Meeting Land. The inhabitants don’t like to be pushed around. They’ll just push back. This is not for the shy or the unadventurous! You’re going to have to be missionary, secret agent, psychologist and aid worker rolled into one.

Before you sign up, ask yourself: are you the sort of person who could …

Operate in disguise, changing who you appear to be to suit different meeting situations? This could also include deep deception or what we call ‘going native’, pretending to be one of the boring people to gain their trust.

Become an expert in forgery, quickly separating valuable meetings from counterfeit ones?

Hijack meetings from individuals who don’t know how to lead them as well as setting off the occasional full-scale mutiny to regain control when the leadership has gone to sleep?

Set up revolutionary cells, operating under new meeting rules without permission or fear?

Defuse unexploded bombs of emotion which lie under the surface of even polite meetings as well as setting off the occasional controlled detonation?

Practise biological warfare, releasing viruses that make your colleagues allergic to unhealthy practices and create effective new addictions to replace their current ones?

Be bad. Nothing is going to change unless you are prepared to misbehave a little. At school you’d be punished for being a disruptive influence, here it’s an entry requirement. But being bad also means not looking good. Are you willing to try something new and get it wrong? I ask because a lot of us would do anything rather than appear fallible, and even the toughest meeting revolutionaries can unravel when their ego is threatened. Mistakes are inevitable if you really commit to doing things differently. Can you handle that and learn from them?

And, finally, could you

Be ruthless, mercilessly killing off ‘nearly’ meetings you don’t need? You’ll be brutally hacking into the undergrowth of regular meetings choking your day. And culling the cute, furry little ad hoc meetings that look up with those puppy eyes and say, ‘Take me home, I won’t take up much time and I’ll make you feel soooo important.’

If you can answer yes to these questions, then welcome to the rest of the book. Please, stand and repeat after me the motto of the Guild of Meeting Mischief Makers. ‘Finis ad Fastidium!’^* That’s ‘Bore No More’, to you and me.

Remember, this isn’t a book about boring meetings and whether you want to have them. It’s a book about boring lives and whether you want to live one.

* Despite our title I’m not sure I’d recommend a donut as a meeting snack. As the New York Obesity Research Center puts it, ‘The average donut is nothing more than refined sugar and flour, artificial flavors and partially hydrogenated oil that’s loaded with trans fats. When it comes to health, the only thing good about them is the hole.’

* Some clients do prefer the alternative Latin motto which goes: ‘Quaerimus Et Si Non Invenio Facimus Malum (we go looking for trouble – and if we don’t find any, we make some) but it’s harder to print on a T-shirt.