Are meetings, procedures and controls all signs of mediocrity?

Nobody likes meetings and status reports. What's the point of these non-work-producing activities?

In a recent column ("Hard choices," Keep the Joint Running, 11/10/2008) I described a disruptive but talented employee this way: "He's also the one who loudly declares staff meetings to be wastes of time, IT's standard operating procedures to be wastes of storage, and most of his co-workers to be wastes of carbon."

To which I received this comment:

Dear Bob ...

Trouble is, he's right. Everyone else has long since been conditioned to, in effect, embrace mediocrity.

Think of it this way, after you retire, and think back on all that, will you say, "Boy, am I glad we had those meetings and all those procedures, and most of all, adhered to everything the auditors said was Sarbanes Oxley."

No, you will think it was all a waste of American productivity.
Why do we put up with this stuff, especially weekly status reports?

- Tired of the wasted

Dear Fatigued ...

No, actually, I won't think it was all a waste. When I call a meeting there's a reason for it. Reasons vary from meeting to meeting, of course. If you think it's possible to, for example, bring ten people into consensus without getting them together to hash things out, I'd love to learn the technique. In the world I live in, people don't automatically agree, and getting them into some semblance of alignment is hard, time-consuming work.

Important work too, for some issues leaders have to take on.

I'm surprised you think standard operating procedures are wastes of time.

Sure, they can be taken off a cliff, where the attempt to proceduralize everything strays deeply into the ridiculous. In the absence of procedures, though, every server is a unique work of art, every call to the Service Desk is tracked to completion only if the person taking the call happens to have a good personal tickler system, and the company database has twelve fields that do the exact same job because nobody updates the documentation or refers to it.

As for Sarbanes Oxley … it's been on the receiving end of so much propaganda it's hard to withstand the onslaught. Those who have to implement it and live with it tell me several things about it:

1. The core principles of what it insists on are what companies should be doing anyway.

2. Those executives who dislike it the most are the ones who want to be allowed to fiddle with the books to fool investors (and themselves) into thinking the company is healthier than it really is.

3. It requires far more documentation than it needs to.

There's no question: Management is an overhead cost. Corporate controls are another overhead cost. Most meetings fall into the category of overhead costs as well.

It's in the nature of some overhead costs that without them, unit costs would spiral out of control. You might as well argue that a speedometer is a bad idea in car, because it wastes horsepower that would otherwise go into turning the wheels.

The statement would be accurate so far as it goes, but would leave quite a bit that's essential out of the picture.

- Bob