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In favor of boring meetings
Here is my Forbes piece (free registration required), in the October 1 issue. Excerpt:
Meetings also confer a sense of control. Attendees feel like insiders who have a real voice in decisions. This boosts their motivation to implement ideas discussed as a group. For this reason it is especially important to listen to the blowhards and the obstructionists, who otherwise would pursue their own agendas rather than support a common plan.
Frequent meetings help a business apply bonuses and yearly evaluations with greater precision. Evaluations are inherently problematic. The natural human tendency is to feel slighted or get upset at anything less than a perfect evaluation. By contrast, meetings reaffirm the value of the individual to the company. When the time comes for the boss to offer criticism or dock a bonus, a worker who has been to many meetings is more likely to take the feedback in a constructive spirit and respond with improvement rather than resentment.
In other words, meetings are fundamentally a form of "social theater" and should be analyzed as such. Now if only speakers had to pay by the minute...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 18, 2007 at 12:16 PM in Education | Permalink
Comments
The company I currently work for, with about 100 employees, has the fewest meetings, the highest productivity, and the best morale I've experienced since joining the workforce in 1966. The lack of meetings is a major selling point in attacting high quality people. 'Course we are programmers and engineers, we only build stuff.
Posted by: Tom Crispin at Sep 18, 2007 12:58:32 PM
Here I thought meetings were a vehicle to absolve oneself of any kind of decision and avoid actually having to do something.
Posted by: jacob at Sep 18, 2007 12:59:13 PM
Often it's theatre of the absurd.
Posted by: PJ at Sep 18, 2007 1:17:35 PM
Tyler-
You must be joking.
Posted by: Rich Berger at Sep 18, 2007 1:29:55 PM
Also from the article: "...the demand for high-quality, in-person education has never been higher. In other words, in education as in business, the competitive marketplace is reaffirming the value of meetings. For many human purposes there is simply no good substitute for being there."
But this is only true for about 60 percent of learners. For almost half of all students past the age of 16 there is a great deal of evidence that a well constructed community, even populated by animated or fixed-visual images of others, is enough to engage the 'social connection' of a learning space.
Posted by: The other Eric at Sep 18, 2007 1:32:50 PM
Cohen, March and Olsen. A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice. ASQ 1972.
Posted by: Kieran at Sep 18, 2007 1:33:11 PM
Some meetings are social rituals, a place to trash those who aren't in the meeting (i.e., higher management, co-workers in other units) and a way to salve the anxieties of a manager who's unsure of him/herself. By having everyone pay obeisance and by supposedly getting the latest scoop from everyone you (I) can dream that I'm securely on top of things.
Posted by: Bill Harshaw at Sep 18, 2007 3:02:38 PM
The Ivory Tower has rarely seemed more remote.
Posted by: eriks at Sep 18, 2007 4:04:05 PM
Ha. The best meeting I ever had was with the very disreputable motorcycle club I belong to. There were seven new prospects for only two memberships, and there were LOTS of issues. It promised to be ugly.
It was proposed that if anyone wanted to speak, they had to wear a hair-clip on their nose. The clip had sharp teeth and was quite painful after just a few seconds. The proposal was adopted immediately and unanimously. After that, the remainder of the meeting took only five minutes, with everyone present in complete agreement on the outcome.
I swear, we could have peace in the Middle East in no time if everyone who wanted to flap their jaw had to suffer as much as their audience.
Posted by: Tony at Sep 18, 2007 4:38:31 PM
Didn't I just read the same ideas in JK Galbraith's The Great Crash?
Posted by: Stumblng Tumblr at Sep 18, 2007 6:35:30 PM
No offense Tyler, but this is one time when you're out of touch.
An academic advocating the business meeting in a real work place where time really is money, and productivity is more than a buzzword.
I've been in 3 different professions; education, finance and aerospace.
Faculty meetings at school were useless.
Most aerospace meetings are merely formality so someone can check off a "to-do" list from some new management book they just read.
The meetings in finance were short enough that they could almost be called productive. If for no other reason to bring the team together because the nature of our business meant that we could go weeks without ever seeing everyone within a reasonable amount of time.
Aerospace is where I've lived for the most part. The meetings at my current place of employment could be productive for airing out some disagreements between combative departments, but the weasels just sit and smile whenever they have a full audience. That's a leadership problem, and another subject though.
Posted by: Ray G at Sep 18, 2007 8:05:17 PM
Data please.
Posted by: M. Hodak at Sep 18, 2007 9:55:41 PM
Wow. Reading this intro made me angry enough, don't think I could stomach reading the Forbes' article. Meetings as theater?! An inexecusable waste of time. Way way way off base.
Posted by: Jason Wehmhoener at Sep 19, 2007 12:50:24 AM
I think Mr. Cowen is saying, not that meetings are good for you (the employee), but that they're good for your employer because they help you accept pay cuts and demotions that you otherwise might not be able to stomach.
Posted by: sammler at Sep 19, 2007 4:39:46 AM
Tom Crispin,
You may have few meetings...
But how many internal mailing lists are you on? Do you have an in-house
message board? How many informal, sit around in your bosses office and
bounce programming ideas off of each other moments do you have?
Posted by: Xmas at Sep 19, 2007 10:12:36 AM
I agree with you, Tyler. As you note, the real question is why to make people listen to the blowhard time-wasters. Your first answer is one I have long believed in: it allows incompetents to substitute talking, which merely wastes some time, for actually taking part in the decision or blocking the plan. In fact, other people really don't have to listen intently. The blowhard wants to talk, not necessarily to be heard, though he does need bodies in front of him.
This leads to a second reason for letting them talk. They get great pleasure from it. Their pleasure may well be greater than the time loss to the rest of us. Even if it is not, it can, going back to what I said before, part of an implicit deal: the blowhards get to say what they want, and the rest of us get to do what we want.
Posted by: Eric Rasmusen at Sep 20, 2007 7:06:17 AM
I agree with you, Tyler. As you note, the real question is why to make people listen to the blowhard time-wasters. Your first answer is one I have long believed in: it allows incompetents to substitute talking, which merely wastes some time, for actually taking part in the decision or blocking the plan. In fact, other people really don't have to listen intently. The blowhard wants to talk, not necessarily to be heard, though he does need bodies in front of him.
This leads to a second reason for letting them talk. They get great pleasure from it. Their pleasure may well be greater than the time loss to the rest of us. Even if it is not, it can, going back to what I said before, part of an implicit deal: the blowhards get to say what they want, and the rest of us get to do what we want.
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