InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
Ask The Secret CIO
By Herbert W. LovelaceIssue date: Feb. 25, 1997
Your letters to my print column and this E-mail forum ask some serious questions about managing information technology in today's world. Since today's world is essentially absurd, my serious responses may sometimes sound a little whimsical, and my occasional whimsical ones, serious. In any case, if you want to participate, write to me at secret@cmp.com . I'll respond to those letters that I can. I reserve the right to edit for size and content. Just sign your E-mail the way you want it to appear online.
We have gotten a lot of good ideas from readers as commentary on the my three InformationWeek columns about meetings (" The First Law of Meetings ," Nov. 4; " No Decision Before Its Time ," Nov. 25; and " If It Isn't Vital, Let's Talk ," Dec. 9). Here is a sampling.
Dear Herb:
Peter Jones, the computer wizard and Australian sheep rancher who left his sheep for a few years to come to Minnesota and develop software for an early supercomputer (remember those?), calculated the IQ of a committee as the IQ of the dullest person on the committee divided by n, the number of people on the committee.
This may be a lemma supporting the proof of your first law of meetings.
Keep up the good work!
Peter P.
Dear Peter:
I thi nk you and Peter Jones are on to something there, but I believe it is even more profound. I suspect that, given enough meetings, the actual IQs of everyone in the room begin to migrate to that of the lowest IQ available in the room. It is possible that, as with second-hand smoke or repetitive-strain injury, we may see legal action against firms for permitting IQ Proximity Damage.
Dear Mr. Lovelace:
Your interpretation is not without merit. With a slight change in emphasis it could be stated as follows:
"The length of time worth staying at a meeting is inversely proportional to the square of the number of attendees."
Roy S.
Dear Roy:
I accept your analysis, especially since it implies that a meeting that has no attendees is of infinite value.
Dear Herb:
I have experimentally verified your hypotheses with respect to your First and Third laws. In addition, I may have identified two special cases of the Third Law, which deal with the formula a s the denominator I (importance of the topic) approaches the values of zero or infinity: If a topic is truly trivial, discussion will continue at subsequent meetings until an issue has been nurtured from where previously there was none. If a topic is of utmost importance, and of a magnitude which would render all other conversation meaningless by comparison, it will not be discussed at all.
Doug R.
Dear Doug:
A worthy observation. There is no question that trivial topics spawn other trivial topics that require further meetings. Sort of like creating life out of the primordial mud. I wonder what the threshold value is before standing committees are appointed to deal with the trivial topic that didn't deserve any air time in the first place.
Mr. Lovelace:
I always turn to the back of InformationWeek when it arrives to read your irreverent comments first. A couple of your columns have become classics around here.
Since you are developing a theory on meetings, I would l ike to suggest that a Grand Unified Theory of Meetings needs to include the planning and scheduling aspects. Planning, for example, might be inversely proportional to the importance of the topics being addressed. The likelihood of a meeting occurring at a scheduled time is inversely proportional to the number of people involved and the number of previous commitments for each person.
Houston
Dear Houston:
Good thoughts but somewhat incomplete. It seems that the planning time is also a function of the level and number of people calling the meeting, not just attending. If a committee calls a meeting and it is about something soft, like employee morale sinking because of the number of meetings being held, then the work involved in setting up the meeting will go out of sight.
Hi Herbert:
I enjoy reading your Secret CIO column in InformationWeek . Keep up the great work!
Your First Law of Meetings certainly resonates with me. However, it seems that "techie" people don't really fit into that category. The less technical a person is, the more apt he is to have longer meetings. So add a scaling factor to your formula, with Techies on one end, and Salespeople on the other.
Regards,
Matt H.
Dear Matt:
Take a step back. Have you ever sat in a meeting and heard two database types discuss the relative merits of how records are locked or of access techniques? They're happy, but it is like listening to the faucet drip at 3 a.m.
Dear Herbert:
I sure have enjoyed your comments regarding meetings. I'll add some of my own on meetings in general and on your first law:
* Likelihood of attendance is directly proportional to the quality of refreshments.
* Speaking the truth in meetings reduces your number of meeting invitations.
Now, on to your first law and some ideas on why it is true. Consider a typical meeting scenario: A person makes a comment. A second person makes his comment and also comments on the first person's comm ent. Each subsequent person making a comment must also comment on each prior comment.
Therefore with P people, the total number of comments is P + (P - 1) + (P - 2) ... + 1 or the Sum from 1 to P. The formula for this summation is P * (P + 1) / 2. This is about half of your P squared. After this first round of commenting on comments, the need to comment on previous comments cuts in half with each subsequent round. If the first round is P * (P + 1) / 2, the second round will be P * (P + 1) / 4 , the third will be P * (P + 1) / 8 and so on. Eventually the comments on comments approaches zero and the whole series approaches the P squared of your formula.
Thanks again for being a voice of reason in the vast wasteland of meeting-driven corporate culture.
Oliver
Dear Oliver:
I addressed the importance of the refreshments at meetings in "Consider The Kiwi Factor" (Feb. 26, 1996). Your idea that speaking the truth at a meeting will keep you from being invited back is interesting. I wonder wh ich groups in a corporation (marketing, human resources, R&D, etc.) hold the most meetings and which the least. Or, we could cut it another way and ask whether the clerks or the bosses get invited to the most meetings.
Dear Secret CIO:
After reading your article on this new discovery, I was wondering if you will be receiving a Nobel Prize. I have tried different ways in which to reduce the amount of wasted time that I and my staff have spent in meetings.
I will take the three laws as outlined in your article and apply them to upcoming meetings. Now that I am armed with information maybe I can reduce the meeting time. It's worth a try!
I always enjoy reading your column but have never taken the time to acknowledge your work.
Greg V.
Dear Greg:
I doubt that a Nobel Prize will be forthcoming, even though several readers thought the laws were useful. It would be nice, though; you know -- the trip, meeting the king, listening to his words of wisdom. The closest I ever came to an experience like that was the time I rode up on the elevator to a coffee and pastry reception with the Executive Committee where Phil Whitestone, our beloved president, thanked the heads of the staff groups who met their yearly budget projections.
Herb:
Just read your latest installment, "If It Isn't Vital, Let's Talk." The article had me ROTFLOL (rolling on the floor, laughing out loud -- AOL jargon). The heck with that E-mail suggestion about sending your stuff to Scott Adams. Compile it yourself and put out a book! Become a megamillionaire yourself!
I have decided to start collecting your columns. If you don't put out that book, I'll pull the age-old online tradition and pilfer your stuff and sell it on the Internet, and become a megamillionaire myself! Signed,
Too Lazy To Do, Always Ready To Steal
Dear Too Lazy:
Sorry, but I suggest you stick with your job. I probably will put the stuff out in a book if it looks like there is enough interest -- and besides, when was the last time you heard of anyone making money on the Internet?
Dear Herb:
Can you recommend the best book or reading material that you have found that deals with managing or dealing with office politics? Something that describes the pitfalls and guidelines, and that outlines how best to adapt my previous goal-oriented life, as a developer, to the new career- and image-preservation-oriented life as a member of the senior team.
Corporately yours,
Dave N.
Dear Dave:
Actually, all the books that purport to tell you how to deal with corporate politics would at best teach you to become just like the people we really don't like, and that would make it difficult for you to shave in the morning since you would have trouble looking at yourself in the mirror. At worst, they would make you think you were prepared to deal with situations with which you could not cope, and then you would have the double difficulty of having acted like slime and been a fa ilure at it.
The best book that I know doesn't think it tells you how to handle office politics. It is Judith M. Bardwick's "Danger in the Comfort Zone." Judy's book (and she is really a neat person) basically tells you that people have to work for what they have and that all the games that we go through in business are non-productive for the corporation as a whole. It is the ultimate meritocracy tome -- and as we know, meritocracy has no place for office politics. Well worth reading.
Got a question for The Secret CIO? Just send an E-mail .
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