Читать книгу Will there be Donuts?: Start a business revolution one meeting at a time - David Pearl - Страница 34

Steve, a prominent LA tax and business advisor, takes client service seriously. And so he should. His starry clients are the sort of people who expect him to be on call 24/7.

In case you were thinking your senior people are capriciously demanding, you should spend a day or two in the performing arts where Stars can be really Starry. One tale I know to be true from my time in the opera world is that of a sumptuously gifted but notoriously high-maintenance operatic soprano who was feeling a little warm in the back of her limo while driving through Manhattan. Too grand to lean forward and ask the driver to turn up the air-conditioning, she picked up the limo phone, called her agent in Los Angeles, who then called the driver in New York with the message.

Steve talks of his earlier career in a large corporate practice where he was expected to attend a daily meeting at 11.00 known (I kid you not) as the Donut Meeting because there was nothing much else to talk about. “I was an outlier,” he admits.

I was one of the few people who thought that if you are in a service company that the real priority was to, well, serve clients. I felt that instead of sitting around shooting the breeze there might be things that the client would actually want you to do, things you were, er, paid to do. So I used to excuse myself from the Donut meetings and go to talk to some clients. Actually pick up the phone and speak to them. It seemed to me that most of the others were actually scared of doing that. You’d ask them if they had called client A and they’d answer yes. “When?” Three weeks ago. “And since then?” Well, they’d been busy in meetings.

Clients don’t want to hear you are in meetings. They want to hear you on the other end of the phone. It’s not great telling billionaire clients bad news, but I find it’s always better than hiding away. Instead of holding a Donut meeting, I would go and talk to a few people and get the job done.

Steve has nicely summed up one of the key messages of this book. Instead of holding wasteful meetings, get out there and start having the real meetings and conversations that really matter.

Or, as the T-shirt would say: Fewer Meetings—More Meeting.