Meetings make life urgent.

Throughout my advertising career, I have been defined by the meetings I have.  Certainly, who I meet with and what we meet about are two important factors in defining my career.  However, my business style has been shaped very much by the frequency of meetings that I have had.  There have been seven-meeting days, and fifty-meeting weeks.

So much so that my friends have nicknamed me, “Schedule.”  Much of my life is fit during the in-between periods – gaps in my schedule as I scurry from one meeting to another.

It is very much a part of Vietnam’s business culture here.  People are averse to deciding much on the phone; decisions are made in meetings.  Real conversation is made in meetings.  There can be true value in meetings.

However, some people also set meetings as a haphazard way of setting deadlines.  I have found that in Vietnam, if you do not set a meeting, what happens is that work does not get finished on time.  People tend to focus on urgent things, rather than the important things, and I am as guilty of this as anyone else.  And without a meeting set, things just simply are not urgent enough.

So, what makes a meeting urgent?

As managers here in Vietnam, we often talk about face and shame.  Fundamentally, Vietnamese people are always aware of being que, essentially, looking foolish in front of a group of people.  The word que is best translated as “being a country bumpkin” or being “out of one’s depth.”

Nobody likes to look like an idiot.  In Vietnam, if you make someone look like an idiot, you might get death threats.

In Vietnam, you are not supposed to shame people in public.  Despite how poorly someone is performing, you can never say things like “you are doing a shit job.”  Even if everyone in a room agrees that one person is performing poorly, you cannot say “Jamie is not doing her job.”  I have done this before, and I have had my star performers pull me aside and say “You shouldn’t say that.  I know it’s true, but you are hurting the morale of the team.”

Here, meetings make people accountable.  They pressure of having to present something makes their ordinary tasks urgent.  Give them a list of things that they are supposed to have done between meetings, and miraculously, they will be done.  And it isn’t because they suddenly become more productive.

They realize that they will have to stand up and tell everyone room that they did not complete their tasks.  They will have to tell everyone that they let the team down.

And fundamentally, this is a huge reason why I had so many meetings to go to.

Without meetings, nothing is urgent, and nothing gets done.

Imaginary Work and Arbitrary Lengths

When I worked at Burger King, you could easily measure my productivity by the number of Whoppers I made, or the customers that I served.  In a factory situation, it is much the same.  Your productivity is measured by your output.  Sales people are measured by sales calls and sales revenue.

However, managers have no clear measurement of productivity.  Instead, they have somehow set meetings as a measure of their productivity.

It is very easy for a mediocre manager to set  a bunch of meetings to create the illusion of productivity.  Often times, I show up at meetings without a clear understanding of:

• Why are we meeting?
• How important is it?
• What are my expected outcomes?

I am as guilty of this as anyone else.  I guess I should write something on how to have great meetings.

One of the senior managers at Edge, Natalie Lockwood is great at meetings.  She always blocks off time pro-actively for work; this is sacred time where no meetings can ever be scheduled.  I think she sets meetings only in the mornings, and uses the afternoons for work. She also has awesome pre and post meeting discipline.

• Before each meeting, she has an agenda in place.  If it is with an external client or supplier, she makes sure we have a short internal meeting to set expectations and objectives.  Also, the pre-meeting meeting is used to review whatever materials we are bringing for quality and completeness.  If work is left unfinished, it is at this point we figure out our talking points.  Sometimes it is okay to miss a deadline if you have a reasonable explanation for it, and what is reasonable is dependent upon how you communicate to the client.
• After each meeting, notes need to be documented.  To Do lists need to be set, and next steps are imperative.

Meetings are intensive investments in time.  Imagine having 8 people in a one-hour meeting.  Essentially, that is 1 day of work from highly skilled (and paid) people.

In a meeting, everyone wants to feel important.  Everyone wants to say something.  Everyone wants to waste time.

Last Friday, I was introduced to Andy Lopata by Matt Underwood, owner/founder/grand poobah of local PR agency Matterhorn Communications.  Andy was here to speak at a conference, and provide training to one of the more successful MLM companies here.

Anywho, Andy and I got to talking a little bit about networking strategies, and I mentioned an article I had recently read about the importance of 50 coffees especially as a measure of networking mastery.  To be honest, I had misremembered  the article, and thought that it mentioned 250 coffees.

In Gladwell’s the Tipping Point, he how 10,000 hours are the minimum amount needed to show mastery of a subject or skill.  In this article, Mark Suster writes that 50 coffees are what you need to get out of your comfort zone, and that for true effectiveness you should aim for 5  coffees per week, for a total of 250 coffees.

You should do this if you are:

• Recruiting
• Jobhunting
• Raising money
• Working with journalists

I imagine that this advice is similar to that of what Keith Ferrazzi writes in his book “Never Eat Alone.”  I remember in my early days of advertising in Vietnam, I was easily having 10 coffee meetings per week, growing my network, learning what people’s frustrations were and how I might be able to help in each situation.

Those of you who have seen my Outlook inbox may notice that it’s pretty empty.  Not that people don’t email me, I’ve got a healthy daily volume of a couple hundred emails I need to work through (in addition to my real job).  Trust me, my official responsibility here at New Media Edge is not email minder.  That was my job almost 14 years ago!

Via Getting Things Done, I have learned the value of keeping my professional Inbox empty (or close to) and filing everything aways as ToDos, Later and Reference.  With my personal Gmail account though, it has become much more difficult for me to do so.  Everything in my Gmail seems equally important/unimportant to me, which often leaves my personal emails languishing in my box.  For a long time.

So with Google’s new release of Google Priority Inbox, I hope it resolves that.  I like the way they start their introduction video:

Email is good.  Too much Email is bad.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nt3gE9dGHQ&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Google Priority Inbox sorts your email by who emails you the most often, and who you REPLY to most often and most quickly.  Therefore, those people who email you a lot but you never respond end up in the normal mail box, and the people who email you rarely (but to whom you respond quickly and often) end up on the other side of the velvet rope in the VIP Google Priority Box.  I’m looking forward to using this.

Here are some tips from Mashable you may want to check out.

I had an interesting lunch with the head of an advertising agency here in Vietnam last week.  The conversation jumped around from the ad market here, to our respective backgrounds to the issues that are plaguing America and why we have chosen to live in Vietnam.  Certainly, we laid much of the blame at America’s rampant consumerism and that everything bigger is by default better.  I myself used to believe that (and do not be surprised if I somehow fall into that trap again sometime).

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Americans were taught that not only COULD they live above their means, the SHOULD live above their means.

Now, we are being taught that living below your means is a good thing.  Which in many ways, it is.  You spend what you can afford, and save money for the occasional rainy day or disaster.  This certainly is understandable.

However, if you save too much money, or save every little penny, then consumption nationwide goes down, and the economy stagnates.  This is the problem that has been plaguing Japan for the last couple decades, and led to the rise of the Freeter.

Freeter (フリーター furītā?) (other spellings below) is a Japanese expression for people between the age of 15 and 34 who lack full time employment or are unemployed, excluding homemakers and students. They may also be described as underemployed or freelance workers. These people do not start a career after high school or university but instead usually live as so-called parasite singles with their parents and earn some money with low skilled and low paid jobs. The low income makes it difficult for freeters to start a family, and the lack of qualifications makes it difficult to start a career at a later point in life.

My friend said simply “Living below your means is just sad.  It’s pathetic. Money is there to make you happy.  Why put yourself through the stress of working if you never spend what you have earned.”

And after that, I went and bought myself a painting to enjoy.  :)

People learn more from their mistakes than from their successes.  This is one of those time honored, truths.  Yet, when we look at business books out there, for the most part we are reading about people’s successes than their failures.

Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell are two of my favorite business writers.  They inspire me, and help me see the world in new ways.  However, I would not call them business books for entrepreneurs.   They feel more like inspirational or self-help books to me.  The reason being is that they offer little in the way of practical advice.  Both writers revel in the theoretical, which is great for thought-provoking conversation.  However, for entrepreneurs (and wannabe’s like myself), without practical advice, you tend to information overload.

Other popular business books are based around successful companies, or rather, successful Fortune 500 Enterprise companies.  They talk a lot about the journey a company has made, from humble beginnings (in coffee shops, garages or on the backs of napkins) to their fantastic victories, but once again offer little in the way of practice advice.  In this respect, they belong just as much in the History section of a bookstore, as the business section.

I have always said that if I were to ever write a business-type book, it would be along the lines of “My 100 worst mistakes,” to share what I have done wrong in business (and other areas of my life), and more importantly how to cope.  In doing that, it would be very much a biography/inspirational book (I hope).  At the very least, it would mirror my own learning style, and hopefully be useful to those who read it.

So what should aspiring business owners read?  Certainly, not my hypothetical treatise on making mistakes.  Per this blog post on ReadWriteWeb, you should read business books, articles and blogs which give you a clear, immediate return on your investment.  In these cases, your investment is not just the money, but also the time you put into reading and the mental storage space you set aside for the information:

Rather, he argues that you need to make your reading really focused, rather than simply consuming the generalist business book genre. “Look for resources that provide actionable take-aways to improve your business and that focus on topics that are specifically relevant to your situation. You want laser-focused, just-in-time learning.”

An article I read recently states “You must first die before you get to heaven.”

Of course, this is a metaphor for your life, both personal and professional.

First, we define what “heaven” means:

Heaven is what you imagine paradise to be.  For many of us, it means achievement.  Heaven can mean getting that dream house you’ve always wanted, or finally starting a successful business.  Perhaps it is fame and getting recognized for your own unique and special talents.

Certainly, everyone wants to have nice things in life, live in an expensive house, travel and have a social life full of close friends and family.  It is this point, that we call “Heaven.”

And if that is heaven, what do we call “dying?”

“Dying” put simply, is the sum of the sacrifices you make on the journey to success (“heaven”).  If you are aiming high, you are also aiming to spend your personal time, your hobbies and forego a lot of pleasure in exchange for a brighter future.  Certainly, no future is guaranteed.  However, I am a graduate of the school that “hard work is always rewarded.”

You just never know how it will reward you, nor when.