Читать книгу Will there be Donuts?: Start a business revolution one meeting at a time - David Pearl - Страница 15

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 somber 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 organized, 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.”