#241: the courage to find better ways…
Dear friends
If you need a smile (who doesn’t?), this video of two playful leopard clubs may do the trick. If you’re more of a fashion-loving sort, then these collabs between African designers and global brands might suffice.
/strategy
We all complain about them. There are too many of them, too few of them are well-planned, quite often we don’t need to be in them, very often they yield no action and frequently add complexity and confusion. Yep, you’ve got it. Meetings.
If internal audit departments counted time lost to meetings, I wager something would be done. But, they don’t. For reasons mysterious to everyone in corporate life the not-so-merry-go-round of meetings persist, sucking up valuable time and cash.
Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao’s The Friction Project tells us that Bain, the management consulting firm, calculated that one company devoted three hundred thousand hours a year preparing for a weekly executive team meeting and that Deloitte “tallied the number of hours the organization was spending on performance management – and found that completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings consumed close to two million hours a year.”
Rebecca Hinds, Head of Asana’s Work Innovation Lab, is an unusual soul. She refused to accept the status quo of ‘death by meeting’. Under her leadership, with support from Sutton and Rao, Asana launched the Meeting Doomsday programme.
The first step asked employees to rate, using a three-point scale, how much effort each meeting required and its value for helping them achieve goals.
It is so simple; you could have this done in your organisation by the end of the week.
The Asana team identified 150 meetings that they characterized as high effort, low value.
They then launched a pilot programme to eradicate or reduce meetings. On average, participants saved 11 hours a month.
It doesn’t seem a lot. It is only an hour every second day.
Over a year, it amounts to 16.5 days. Effectively, an extra 3 focused weeks a year. If you run a business or team of 500 people, it’s the equivalent of hiring 32 more people. And you said you’ve got no budget for extra headcount.
(Mark Dawe shared the very useful Meeting Bill of Rights. And, if you’re looking for inspiration to unlock excellence in your business, these case studies from Pixar and Michelin may help).
//self
As you know Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, passed on last month.
As the speculation about their deaths swirled, the obituaries repeated a story that Hackman often told, that he and Dustin Hoffman were voted ‘least likely to succeed’ by their 1960s Pasadena Playhouse classmates.
Whilst finding his feet in New York Hackman worked as a doorman. One day his former army sergeant walked by and affirmed his classmate’s assessment, commenting that he’d always known Hackman would amount to little.
Amongst Hackman’s many awards, were two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. Hoffman won two Academy Awards, three British Academy Film Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards. Not shabby for two no-hopers.
We need never let others’ labels define our lives.
///soul
21 March is South Africa’s Human Rights Day. This week bombs again rained on Gaza. All around the world headlines proclaim increases in the inanest of expenditure, defence spending. Even that phrase obscures its truth. There are many ways to secure defence.
Brown University estimates that between October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024, the US has given Israel $22.76 billion in ‘security assistance’. Nearly $10,000 for each of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. The World Bank estimates Palestinian GDP per capita to be $3,360.
Andrew Brown’s The Bitterness of Olives won the 2024 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. It tells a story of friendship fractured by a broken world.
Khalid Mansour is a Palestinian doctor based in Gaza and Avi Dahan, a retired Israeli detective. They once worked together in Israel. They were close, a team, defying the prejudice that swirled around them until one day it broke them. Dahan did not see it. He thought Mansour ungrateful.
Blinded by the familiar, he could not see what Mansour knew. He could not see it even though his son returned from war and in response to his proud, jocular questions, he says, “People died, Dad. Ordinary men and women died in front of me. Its called war. Its what happens when you invade another country. People die in ways that you cannot conceive. And when you leave, their blood is not just on your boots. It stains your memories. It soaks into your mind. That’s what happened”.
Brown led me to winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.
Thrall tells the story of a bus accident in which six Palestinian school children and their teacher died, many more suffered burns. He telescopes in and out, moving from the details of the day – ambulances delayed at army checkpoints, a twenty-seven-year-old bus driven on ‘neglected, congested roads, without proper lighting, a police presence, or a barrier between the lanes of oncoming traffic’ – to the cumulative strangling of casual cruelties, barriers built, and prison sentences for political views. The accident, a brutal expression of compounding failures and deliberate denials.
Stanley Cavell’s words are A Day in the Life of Abed Salama’s epigraph, “We do not see our hand in what happens, so we call certain events melancholy accidents when they are inevitabilities of our projects, and we call other events necessities because we will not change our minds”.
The apartheid state killed sixty-nine people on 21 March 1960 in Sharpeville. Thousands more died before democracy was won in 1994. Each death futile, a tragedy, treasures denied to the world. Millions more had their potential stunted, more beauty denied. All that violence and hatred yielding nothing but pain. We create our own hells. Surely, we can create our heavens too.
I wish us all the wisdom to see what is, and the courage to find better ways.
Yours with love
Karl
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