Читать книгу Will there be Donuts?: Start a business revolution one meeting at a time - David Pearl - Страница 37

As the doyen of management consultants Peter Drucker once said, “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Many companies are focusing on making their meetings more efficient. That doesn’t mean they are any more effective.

I have a friend who is a world-class management consultant. I’ll call him Ron—not his real name—for the sake of discretion and to prevent his clients taking out a contract on me. He has a great example of a client who has become exquisitely efficient and wildly ineffective at the same time. It’s all to do with paper. The client generates hundreds of thousands of sheets of contracts and agreements at each of their branches every week. The company has had to become supremely talented at moving all this paper around as well as storing and retrieving it. They have invested in ergonomically designed paper-carrying equipment (I think this means strong suitcases), transportation systems, and document logging. They were thrilled with themselves until Ron asked the unasked question: “Why do you need all this paper?” They were ready for this. “Because the regulator requires that we get our customers’ signature.” Ron pressed on: “Yes, but why does that signature have to be on paper?” he asked, no doubt making a lifelong enemy of the Logistics Director. In this digital age there are many legally acceptable forms of signature, of which a mark on paper is only one. There’s a tick on a form, a digitally scanned signature, a thumbprint, even the iris in your eye. Ron’s point was that while the paper is being dealt with efficiently, the more effective course of action would be to invest a tiny fraction of the time, energy, and money into talking with the regulator and finding a paperless solution. Efficient, yes. Effective, no!

I have seen efficient meetings—meticulously planned, immaculately laid out and run perfectly to time—that had no positive effect whatever. (We’ll look a little later in the book at how to redesign meetings so that they are both.) These are classic “nearly meetings.” And they are going to be happening all over the world today and every day. The people are present, or appear to be; the room or the call/video conference suite is booked, the agenda prepared, and yet no connection in a true sense actually happens.