How to talk your way to the top

Janan Ganesh in The FT 

Always doubt the Stoicism of a “Stoic”. If the point of their creed is cool detachment from the world, the active espousal of it seems perverse, like an anarchist’s fiscal policy. Marcus Aurelius, don’t forget, never meant his Meditations — sales of which boomed even pre-lockdown — to be read. Whether his appropriation by the shamans of modern self-help is his triumph or his ultimate rout, I can’t decide. 

Strange, isn’t it, which bits of antiquity we exhume, and which we let lie? The American right wants more of the neoclassical architecture that makes Washington so grand, and so inert. Britain, which is definitely a serious country, is trying to revive Latin in schools. I’d be keener on this Restoration if there were a place for the most sorely missed feature of the ancient world. Bring back, for the sake of the young, the teaching of rhetoric. 

I have seen enough meetings, parties, job interviews, broadcast slots, panel events and dates to sense which habits of speech harm a person’s standing with others, sometimes without either side quite knowing it. They include the filler words “like” and, in England, “sort of”, often pronounced, with nervous speed, “siddiv”. They include starting a sentence with, “I guess . . . ” and ending it with, “Does that make sense?” They include, above all, the interrogative tone in non-interrogative statements. 

What links these familiar but far from exhaustive examples is their disclosure of self-doubt. And not the endearing kind. “Like” stems from a deep fear of pauses, lest the other person stops listening. Upspeak is a constant probing for approval. These tics are all the worse in a non-American as they suggest a further, almost meta lack of confidence: that in one’s own culture. 

The aesthetic case against a lot of modern speech is easy to mount. The challenge is to convince people of the strategic stakes: that mere avoidance of the glitches above will raise their perceived stature. 

In today’s economy, few workers get to be judged on output that is discrete and identifiably theirs (such as a newspaper column). More often, they are among the many contributors to a rolling and amorphous process: a corporate merger, say, or IT maintenance. One effect is that, in all candour, I have no idea what most of you do. 

Another is that a career can hinge on meetings and other “performances” between the actual doing of work. When someone’s added value is so hard to delineate, the spoken word becomes a clue. And this, to stress, is just the professional risk of modern speech habits. It says nothing of the social and romantic costs of sounding like a teenager from Encino. 

The flaw in most self-help is that it dwells on the interior life, rather than outward technique. To exhort someone into a state — of confidence, of Stoicism, of anything — at least in a lasting way, is hard. But small adjustments in what they do can transform their outcomes. And from those real-life gains comes the gradual change in inner state. 

I don’t wish I had had, when young, some protein shake-reviewer on YouTube urging me to live in alignment with my values, dude. What I wish I had had was someone to tell me that nothing — not eye-contact, not spread arms — conveys confidence like a mid-sentence pause. Or that a flat, declarative tone in a room full of upspeakers is such an advantage as to be tantamount to cheating. This, which we moderns learn through trial and error, if at all, is what an Athenian would have recognised as rhetoric. It is a life skill, not just or even mainly a political one. 

When and why our culture stopped treating it as such, others will know. But the victims are all around us. To speak commandingly does not require a John Updike vocabulary or grammatical exactitude. It does not entail the crushing of regional accents and demotic idioms. I offer Manchester’s own Noel Gallagher as a model to emulate, and legion Sloanes as the inverse. As for America, many decades into upspeak, no one who has that tic of the elite campuses and the modish industries has had a sniff of the White House. The people have, in whatever style, spoken.

How to conduct good meetings

 John Gapper in The FT

Jeff Bezos and Winston Churchill do not have much in common, but one is chief executive of a company that is valued at $770bn and the other stopped the Nazis invading Britain, so the advice of both is worth heeding. Amazon’s founder and the UK’s wartime prime minister agreed on one thing: the value of a good memorandum. 

Mr Bezos’s recent letter to shareholders extolled the Amazon practice of starting all internal meetings by everyone present reading a memo of up to six pages, explaining what they are there to discuss. Instead of watching a PowerPoint presentation, or breaking into an immediate debate, Amazon’s executives spend up to half an hour in complete silence, absorbing the briefing that one of them has prepared. 

“This is the weirdest meeting culture you will ever encounter,” Mr Bezos admitted in one interview. The principle is that an executive must refine his or her proposal so fully to express it in narrative form that everyone will be able to understand it. Reading the memo means that all those in the room are informed for the conversation that follows, and are not merely bluffing. 

Churchill would have appreciated the attention Mr Bezos has given to this. On August 9 1940, a month before the Blitz bombing of London started, he dictated a memo to the UK civil service on the subject of memos. “To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long.” he declared. “The discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.” 

Amazon’s approach sounds eccentric, but there is a lot of value in it. Most large companies have too many meetings in general — some executives spend their days traipsing from one airless room to another — and too many of them are disorganised and sprawling. People spout off without knowing much about the topic, or caring whether they do: it becomes a battle of rhetoric. 

Mr Bezos is a student of managerial efficiency — Amazon itself is a huge machine for sucking inefficiency out of the retail industry. He has grasped that starting out with everyone knowing the basics makes the debate both better informed and more democratic. There is less chance of a decision being taken arbitrarily or ignorantly, or of a clique of two or three people in the room controlling the outcome. 

The surprising aspect is his faith in narrative, rather than the data on which Amazon relies. You might have thought that data would rule decision-making at Amazon, but not so. He said: “We have so many metrics . . . and the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you’re measuring.” 

He believes in telling a story vividly, rather than relying on data or graphics, or packaging a business case in bullet points on a slide. Some Amazon memos can be almost like dramas: a typical memo for a new product comes in the form of an imaginary press release for the service, backed by a question and answer brief written in a way that a customer would understand. 

Churchill, a journalist turned politician, was equally a devotee of strong narratives that could shape policymaking. “Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational,” he instructed his civil servants, warning them that “most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether”. 

He and Mr Bezos also agreed on the correct place for any data and slides: somewhere at the back. “If a report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors . . . these should be set out in an appendix,” Churchill declared. Amazon’s data-rich executives must obey the same rule. 

Conciseness can be taken too far. Staff at the US National Security Council were told to trim their policy memos to a single page for Donald Trump because he did not like to read too much. Then it turned out that the president wanted what one official described to the New Yorker as “two or three points, with the syntactical complexity of ‘See Jane run’”, and preferred pictures. 

But preparing a crisp narrative is much harder work than spraying around some sentences on a slide. It requires someone to pause and not only to think through the thread of the argument, but to shape it in a way that can inspire others. Churchill could do that on his feet; the rest of us must concentrate. As Mr Bezos notes, it takes a lot of effort to write a “brilliant and thoughtful” corporate memo. 

The impact of narrative is clear in public speaking. The Technology, Entertainment, Design conference became a global brand by forcing speakers to hone their “Ted talks” ruthlessly for months in advance. No one is allowed to get on stage and improvise some thoughts. A corporate meeting is not a Ted event, but it is still a gathering that needs to be educated. 

Churchill, for whom making well-informed decisions was a matter of life and death, devoted some time on a day when Birmingham was bombed to setting out how to write memos. Mr Bezos has done extremely well for Amazon by appreciating the value of briefing his executives thoroughly. We should probably listen to them.

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings?

Simon Jenkins in The Guardian


Just off to a meeting? Stop right now. Turn back. You will be stuck in an overheated room, chained to a table for an absurd length of time and stopped from proper work. Worse, we are now told that just sitting there is a killer. It shortens life. You will die.  

According to Public Health England, we are so addicted to meetings that we don’t realise the threat they pose to ourselves and our organisations. Its chief executive, Duncan Selbie, told this week’s annual meeting that sitting in meetings “haemorrhages productivity”. It slows metabolism and affects the body’s capacity to regulate its sugar and thus blood pressure. This leads to obesity, diabetes, cancer … and death. So don’t do it. Don’t go.

The Get Britain Standing campaign agrees. It says that sedentary office activity is now as dangerous to health as smoking. It takes an hour of exercise to eliminate the toxins built up in one round-table session. Meanwhile, the Columbia University Medical Center this week produced a no less alarming statistic. After tracking 8,000 individuals in all walks of life, it concluded that inactivity for 13 hours a day (including sleep) makes “risk of death” 2.6 times more likely than it is for inactivity of less than 11 hours.

The best meeting is spent walking, like in The West Wing. (The fact that all West Wingers seem on the verge of a heart attack is apparently irrelevant.) Mike Loosemore of the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health rather desperately advises regularly standing up and getting a glass of water. Neanderthals must be laughing themselves sick at what Homo sapiens has to do just to survive.

While we can take that with a pinch of salt, it feeds a wider meetings malaise. All the revolutions of the internet – Skype, Facebook, Twitter – have not diminished humankind’s craving to gather in tedious conclave. Executives ruthless towards workplace productivity are careless of their own offices. Meetings are the cocaine rush of the corporation. I am told there are scores of executives at the BBC, an institution famously addicted to the meetings culture, who are so high on the stuff that they spend the entire day in meetings, and return home with no one any the wiser, except those who pay their salaries.
It is half a century since C Northcote Parkinson first addressed the meeting as social anthropology, yielding his celebrated “coefficient of inefficiency”. It calculated that a meeting of just five people was “most likely to act with competence, secrecy and speed”. Few such bodies exist because five swiftly expands to nine: and two of the nine tend to be “merely ornamental”, people whom no one has the heart to exclude.

Above nine, said Parkinson, “the organism begins to perish”. Once the meeting reaches 20 people, it may as well go on to 100, since by then most of those present are not contributing. They are spectating, talking to each other, squabbling or forming lobbies. Nowadays many are peering at their phones or tablets – pretending to take notes, or frantic not to fall asleep. All are praying for “any other business”.

Management research on meetings is uniformly hostile, yet like most research it has not the slightest practical effect. A recent study by Microsoft, America Online and Salary.com found that the average person works only three days a week. The rest of working time was regarded as wasted, with “unproductive meetings” heading the list. Workers on average regard a third of any meeting as pointless.

Minnesota University’s “decisions” guru, the psychologist Kathleen Vohs, has shown that most executives have a limited stock of “cognitive resource”. It depletes over time, like physical energy. People get impatient, they tire and take worse decisions. Curiously, they leave feeling exhausted, despite hours spent doing nothing at all. Four-hour board or “strategy” meetings are probably disastrous to the firm, inducing torpor, claustrophobia and misjudgment.

Yet still recruits arrive from management schools and consultancies, brilliant zombies doped to the eyeballs in presentations “delivering strategic solutions going forward by thinking out of the box”. They are like chateau generals, kept well away from the front line, versed in the parlour games of the articulate classes. They are for coffee and biscuits, not the watercooler.

Nothing is likely to cut this flab. The meeting has become the ceremony of executive importance: who calls it, who chairs it, who presents to it, who is invited and who is not. Its status is a classic cause of office “fomo” – fear of missing out. It soon develops its Harlequinade, the bad jokesmith, the unstoppable talker, the maddening interrupter, the toadies, bad-mouthers, extroverts and those who just sit in silent despair. None is producing goods or services. In short the meeting is the office as religion. Its sacraments, creeds and acolytes are found in agendas, minutes and note-takers. Its liturgy is the canticle of the PowerPoint. The modern office even has its ritual sanctuary, the “meeting room”: 11.00 for matins, 2.30 for vespers.

Describing meetings as “secret killers of productivity”, Forbes magazine recently suggested they be simply banned, or held “only on Wednesdays” – all other decisions to be taken in absentia. Anyone who needs to be consulted – the “coordination” role of meetings – will find out soon enough. If not they don’t really need to know. The few brave organisations that have experimented with this drastic step report phenomenal improvements in workrate. One worker who said that if he missed a meeting, “my boss would probably kill me”, was told: “In that case he probably should.”

The number, length and size of meetings must be a sound Parkinsonian indicator of an organisation’s productivity or decay. The FTSE or the government should publish an annual league table of meetings per employee per week. It would illustrate the thesis by economist Joseph Schumpeter that all organisations have a natural lifecycle: they grow, they fatten, they ossify into meetings, and they die – unless funded by the state.

I bet Apple had few meetings in the early Steve Jobs days, but I bet it has thousands now. If so, as Parkinson warned of all who broke his laws, sell the shares. As for that meeting, skip it – and live.

Why sport needs to be playful

Ed Smith in Cricinfo


I'd like to make a case for sport. My argument ignores the usual theories - weight lost, arteries unclogged, endorphins released, friendships made, purpose gained, associations formed, communities knit together.


All true enough. But my theme is different. My focus is the value of play, within sport and also in life. Because it is usually perceived as the opposite of serious, we tend to trivialise play. In fact, play needs to be taken much more seriously.


I am making a deliberate distinction between merely "doing" sport and really "playing" sport. For it is possible to play sport unplayfully, joylessly going through the motions, merely acting out a prearranged plan, becoming a cog in a cold machine, becoming totally closed to instinct or mischief. Indeed, one of the ironies of the development of modern sport - both professional and, more depressingly, amateur - is that it has become progressively less playful.


There is, I think, a unique category of play, different and special: playful play. This is not, obviously, the exclusive preserve of sport - it is also central to good conversation, intellectual life, music and scientific invention. In my personal experience, however, I feel a great debt to sport in particular. Perhaps unusually for a professional sportsman, I am reflective, analytical and happy with long periods of solitude. Playing sport - really playing sport - was not only a counterpoint (and a pleasure). It has also been a catalyst.


My experience is backed up by academic research. I recently read Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation by the scientists Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin. I recommend it to sports fans and sceptics alike.


Much of the book is unconnected to sport. According to Bateson and Martin, play is "an evolved biological adaptation that enables the individual to escape from local optima and discover better solutions". They use the example of a squirrel swinging on a branch merely playfully, which by accident enables it to reach nuts that were previously inaccessible. So the change in behaviour becomes a learned modification; an activity that was apparently without purpose becomes all too useful. That is how kids learn, too, the authors propose: more playful children become creative adults.




The word "creative" has become a corporate cliché. Corporate life wants everyone to be creative, which is a bit like a coach wanting every batsman to score a hundred. Well, of course. But how? The link between creativity and playfulness is rarely accounted for. As the zoologist George Bartholomew concluded: "Creativity often appears to be some complex function of play… The most profoundly creative humans of course never lose this."


Alexander Fleming, who created the penicillin vaccine, was described, disapprovingly, by his boss as treating research like a game. When asked what he did, Fleming replied, "I play with microbes… it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something that nobody had thought of."


In contrast, "the meeting" - enforced boredom orchestrated by authority - is the most anti-playful invention known to man. Any event that is closed, bounded and explicitly humourless is almost certain to be uncreative. In calling a meeting, in the traditional sense, corporations increase the probability of not finding a solution.


Thinking about play has encouraged me to rethink certain aspects of sport. When I was still a professional player, I naturally revered high performance - the score on the board. Now, from the vantage point of retirement, I can see that the only way to "win" at sport, in the deepest sense, is also to enjoy it.


I was fascinated while commentating with Sunil Gavaskar last summer to hear the master batsman say he enjoyed the second half of his career far more than the first. This from the man who scored 20 Test hundreds in his first 50 matches! A slight diminution in output was outweighed, from Gavaskar's perspective, by a far more joyful approach to batting.


When Tiger Woods was in his pomp, many of my colleagues used him as a model, perceiving him as the ultimate sportsman. But I was never so sure. Was it really so enviable, Woods' life? To Woods, sport seemed to be about negating his humanity, ironing the play out of his game rather than embracing it. We might admire his iron willpower. But how many people would a Woods-style career really suit? Santi Cazorla, the impish and mischievous Spain and Arsenal midfielder, seems to have more fun in 90 minutes than Woods has in an entire season.


For the apotheosis of unplayful sport, look no further than Lance Armstrong. Forget the cheating and the bullying for a moment. What could be more depressing than tweeting a photo of yourself sitting alone in suburban luxury surrounded by (fraudulent) yellow jerseys? Were there no happy memories, in his mind rather than his camera, to soften the blow of disgrace?


It is also possible for sportsmen, even within the fiercest battles, to cooperate in permitting an air of playfulness.


You see this occasionally in tennis. Most of the time, of course, tactics are explicitly reductionist and self-interested: doing what the opponent least wants. But occasionally a point develops that is different. Both players are constantly trying to win the point, but they also implicitly - and surely subconsciously - enter a different mode. A slice is followed by another slice (apparently inexplicably), a change of pace leads to another change of pace. In short, a conversation develops, something to be enjoyed and extended. And won. For I'm not interested in showmanship here, exhibition-style showing off or playing to the gallery. But there also are moments within proper combat when players are trying to do three things simultaneously - to win, to play (for the fun of it, selfishly) and also to encourage a similar mood on the other side of the net. It must be a rarefied, complete mode of living.


In normal life there is a simpler reason to stay playful. "We don't stop playing because we grow old," George Bernard Shaw remarked, "we grow old because we stop playing."

Want to boost the economy? Ban all meetings

David Cameron has had the cabinet table extended so more spads can fit around it. Wave goodbye to productivity at No 10

• 
• • Marina Hyde
  • The Guardian, Friday 26 April 2013 20.00 BST

'Nobody really believes cabinet meetings affect anything. Their sole impact on the economy is driving sales of those plastic document folders that hide the text beneath them.' Illustration by Jas

If you want a sense of just how big David Cameron and his ideas are, then know this: a carpenter was recently ordered to build an extension to the cabinet table. A piece of furniture that has seen governments through for more than half a century has now been made even bigger, the better to accommodate the increasing number of people who don't make decisions around it.

To the annals of things that sound like rejected Thick of It plotlines, then, let us add the cabinet table thing. (One troubling irony of The Thick of It's success is what a crutch of Westminster life the show has become. The sheer volume of defeatist politicos who now explain away their days by saying "It was like an episode of The Thick of It" should really be satirised by an episode of The Thick of It.)

Anyway, a cabinet maker – appropriately – really has created a 4ft table extension to make room for all the extra ministers given attendance privileges, and all the special advisers and press officers and other bods who pitch up at 9am every Tuesday looking like they've won a competition to attend a cabinet meeting. (Second prize, to give the old joke a run-out, is attending two.)

It's going to be agony waiting out the 30-year rule to discover what someone's spad said about something that had been decided by some other people somewhere else some other time – but in the interim, I hope No 10 will embrace further advances in the modern science of meetingology. They could start having cabinet off-sites and cabinet awaydays. Perhaps one of Cameron's gurus could appropriate the word iCabinet and fashion a new governance gimmick around it.

It's hardly a new point, but nobody really believes cabinet meetings affect anything. Their sole impact on the economy is driving sales of those plastic document folders that hide the text beneath them. If cabinet attendees let photographers see their cabinet notes, then they might not be allowed to come to cabinet any more.

Yet the cabinet is merely a Westminster example of the meeting malaise that increasingly grips the world. Last month an admittedly non-scientific survey claimed that the average office worker spends more than 16 hours a week in meetings. The average civil servant spends 22, with both public and private sector respondents deeming significant percentages of these meetings to be utterly pointless.

In olden times, one of the best things about print journalism was that there were scarcely any meetings at all, because it seemed to everyone there wasn't time. There was one in the morning, where people took a briskly critical look through that morning's paper before deciding what to put in tomorrow's. And then everyone went off and did it. For most of my colleagues, alas, those days are gone. My own weird job – lancing my brain with a keyboard, basically – is one of the few that requires almost no meetings at all. I count myself one of the luckiest people alive. Friends with non-media occupations often tell me that they are required to attend so many meetings that they wonder when on earth they're supposed to do their actual job. In a surreal non-productive way, the meeting has almost become the job.

Indeed, I'm told by some that the higher up you get in the world of meetings, the more stage-managed they are. Decisions aren't made there: they're just ratified. The old "information sharing" justification is apparently cobblers too, because if you have to wait till the meeting to get the information, then you're really not relevant enough to be at the meeting.

What the vast majority of meetings do is confer status on those blowhards "leading" them, or attendees who really should find other ways to validate themselves. Even Cobra – the snazzy-sounding Whitehall crisis response meeting – is widely griped about, with Scotland Yard's formerly most senior anti-terrorism officer complaining it was "cumbersome and bureaucratic", full of people "jockeying for position", and slowed everything down.

But on people go. Gazillions of meetings are held every day, with every one presumably regarded as an indispensable step toward something worth attaining. What would winning the game of meetings even look like? I suppose you'd battle up all the levels, and finally ascend to the ultimate meeting: one to which you'd actually want to go to. Maybe you'd get in on the Meeting of Meetings, which would be something like that meeting where Obama and Hillary and the joint chiefs watched Osama bin Laden's compound being stormed live. But was that really a meeting? In the photos it looked so passive as to be more like a movie night.

As a last word on meetings, I keep thinking of that radical Dutch urban planner who did away with all traffic lights in various towns, and found road safety dramatically improved. If only, instead of making fatuous interventions on some footballer's disciplinary breach Cameron did something similarly useful with his time. Imagine if he could announce that for one week – in fact, make it a month – all meetings in all workplaces in all Britain were to be banned. People would simply have to muddle through, reclaiming the civilised mores of a time before the answer to everything was to have a meeting. Who knows, a meetingless Britain might even prove that holy of holies for George Osborne – the entirely free initiative that would significantly boost the economy.

How to take minutes of a meeting