Rethinking Meetings.
Image by Underchild using Midjourney.
We spend our time in meetings.
Meetings at work. Meeting friends. Meetings where we present and meetings where we are presented to. Meetings with all sorts of people. Meetings in the real world and meetings over screens and in the future meetings in virtual spaces.
In fact, many of us spend so much time in meetings that how we spend our time in meetings is how we spend a large part of our careers!
In business there are many who find meetings a waste of time and try to make them as short, small and few as possible. Many try to avoid meeting people and have gate keepers and delay tactics ready to brandish. Some leaders use meetings as ways to ensure discipline and instill fear.
A different way to approach meetings.
There are a lot of books and articles on meeting management and how to get the most out of gatherings. Most of them are utter and complete BS because they all focus on how we can get the most out of a meeting, while the focus should be how can we give the most in a meeting.
If we go to a meeting with an “extraction” mindset versus a “giving” mindset we are likely face a number of problems including a) missing meetings where we may have been able to share our knowledge and therefore build goodwill and our reputation , b) become so focused on what we are looking for that we do not discover what we need and c) becoming over confident that we know more than anybody else that we do not learn and grow.
So, we might end up with less and less knowledge, find ourselves shocked and surprised at things that come from left field and suffer a diminished reputation.
To maximize our meeting experiences, we should focus on generosity, empathy and energy as the keys to meetings.
a) Generosity.
How can we leave the person or the people whom we are meeting with or presenting to with a gift? A gift of knowledge or insight or a way to see things that they did not have before. Something that makes them believe that it was a good use of their time to be in the meeting.
Besides knowledge some other ways to be generous include appreciation of their skills and their contributions. Everyone wants to be acknowledged and recognized for their good work.
Another way to be generous is to provide guidance. People are hungry for advice, directions and stories to navigate whatever challenge or situation they face. Providing perspectives, stories and experiences resonate and scale in empowering and growing people.
Knowledge. Appreciation. Guidance.
b) Empathy.
How can we truly understand the other persons perspective and point of view because in doing so we will grow even if you disagree with their perspective or view. If we are presenting, how can we make sure that our talk is relevant to the audience and the issues they have in mind and not some boiler plate boiled anew. Is it not ironic when speakers talk of relevance and customization and but do not customize or make relevant their content to their audience? Basically, they are saying that their time is more valuable than the audience!
Three ways to ensure empathy is to seek to understand by asking, listening and re-stating the problem and situation. By reframing the problem using analogies and other categories and finally by sharing relevant personal experiences.
Understanding signals we are listening. Re-framing telegraphs that the problem or challenge being faced has been shared by others. Personal experiences ensure a human connection and re-enforces that we have been in this person’s shoes or seen others who have been.
Understand. Reframe. Storytelling.
c) Energy.
How can we leave the folks in the meeting more energized and feeling better about themselves? So much of success is attitude, belief and hope. So many meetings leave folks dispirited, brow beaten, scared and worried. One does not have to be all bouncing beans unrealistic but let’s be pragmatically enthusiastic if we want progress.
There are three keys to ending a meeting with energy. First is clarity. People should be clear what next steps are for each of them. Second is belief which is a belief that they can tackle these next steps and finally a plan which is how they go about doing the next steps. At the end of every meeting are things clear, do people believe they have the tools and skills to do what is next and do they have a plan?
Clarity. Belief. Plan.
By focusing on giving versus getting we are almost guaranteeing a great meeting because at minimum the other folks leave the room better off and feeling positive about us. And in feeling that way they become an ally, a supporter and an advocate for us, so we get something out of it.
But what happens is much more. During the meeting once they understand that we are giving without asking, they give in return. Knowledge. Insights. Help. Lots of other stuff. Often in the meeting or as a follow up.
Finally, because we have treated their time as precious, they treat our time as precious.
And this approach to meeting works in both the real world and the virtual world. It works across every culture and country. It is effective in both personal and business situations.
Think about the other person or people.
And meetings become valuable, fun, educational and energizing.
Go beyond rethinking meetings to to Rethinking Work. Out Feb 4. Available for pre-order and bulk orders everywhere including now available for pre-order in India!
Paradox.
To be financially successful in the coming years, it’s not just about capitalizing on the new ways to make or save money.
The world is changing, setting up a situation in which organizations must learn to take two seemingly opposite actions in order to be profitable. As we move to distributed work, as technology advances, and as other trends transform society, a set of opposing but connected forces have emerged: Fragmentation and Integration.
Fragmentation is occurring because of the following four factors:
1. Employee range: different employee types have emerged, from full-time to part-time to contract worker to just-in-time employees hired through marketplaces.
2. Wider spectrum of resources: to get work done, companies are drawing from diverse places, including platforms such as Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers; different real-estate resources, from owned, rented, and accessed (WeWork); and varied ways to reach customers through traditional media, digital media, and more.
3. Differences in measurement: because of technology and a plethora of real-time data, companies can measure everything in astonishing detail, creating a wide variety of dashboards and metrics.
4. Customized products and services: companies now have a growing complexity of products and services in a world where customers expect personalized approaches and different ways to pay.
The Importance of Integration.
As everything fragments into a mind-boggling variety of employee types, resources, measures, and products/services, organizations must integrate these various elements into a viable whole.
Specifically, they must create:
1. Seamless interfaces with employees regardless of employee types: consumers and customers do not want to see the complexity of different types of workers or where they may be based, so companies need to ensure seamless service and handoffs between employees. This complexity is only going to become worse at many companies, and leaders need to figure out ways to coordinate employee projects effectively.
2. Best combination of resources to manage costs: companies need to combine all the resources that go into creating products, to ensure lowest cost and continuous availability.
3. Integrated measurement and dashboards: businesses can combine myriad sources of data into an accessible, useable (by management) dashboard.
4. “Goldilocks” strategy for products and services: companies need a sufficiently large range of services and options to remain competitive but not so many that their complexity leads to increased cost and consumer confusion. The goal is to find the ideal mix.
Integrating all these elements in the face of fragmentation isn’t easy. Managing a paradox is challenging, requiring that leaders go beyond their traditional management strategies and try something new. Yet this is one of the keys to financial success in the future, making it worth the effort.
The most successful companies combine this personalization and customization at every interaction with a combined intelligence that integrates the data, focuses the choices to those most relevant while combining inputs in ways to maximize impact while minimizing costs.
The largest TV network in the world which is You-Tube is a case study of a company that on one end fragments individuals into one person media companies, personalizes messaging and content by viewer but integrates the measurement and the sales process to ensure ease by combining data and providing simplicity of access.
The future of not just media but every firm is this paradox of fragmentation through personalization by person and customization by platform, language and country on the edge combined with integration through data powered by AI algorithms at the core and center.
Work, organizational design, measurement, talent flows and company valuations will all be driven by the ability to handle the paradox.
The Rethinking Work Platform is launched.
Paradox is extracted from Rethinking Work which is 30 days away and available as a book, as an e-book and as an audio book (Feb 4, 2025 including in India). Now available for pre-order on every platform.
The book will be supported by Rethinkingwork.io which will include videos, podcasts, resources and much more. The initial pre-launch platform is up at Rethinkingwork.io. where you can watch videos of the key themes (Watch), download the entire opening of the book (What’s Inside), find comments from CEO’s and more who have read the book (Testimonials), access the first 3 amazing resources on where work is going (Resources) and find a range of places to buy including 25 copies or more at half off (Where to Buy).
There will be much more coming once the book launches.
Until then it would be terrific if you pre-order. This book will change your perspective on work and provide not just trends, cases and points of view but highly actionable frameworks, provocative new data and a vision for how to best thrive in the tsunami that has just begun regardless if you are a CEO or a trainee.
Work will change more between 2019 and 2029 than it has in the five decades before.
Rethinking Work is one way to prepare your firm and yourself.
More on Rishad Tobaccowala here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/bio
The Sense of an Ending.
For the last post of 2024 as many of us look back, a combination of visuals and words on the conflation of time and memory…
“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”
“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
“I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”
“How often do we write our own endings?”
Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala
Words by Julian Barnes from his book “The Sense of an Ending”
6 Keys to Career Success.
Image by Isabelle Watkins using Mid Journey
1) Align with emerging trends.
To succeed you have to ensure that the force is with you.
And to do so you must align with the force.
Often this force appears as a stream and not a gushing river. A weak signal versus an overwhelming pull of gravity.
It may like the Chicago River in that it may be going in the opposite direction of how it should flow in that it does make you question what you believe or what your company or your CEO believes.
In the case of aligning with the trend, try to find a force that will grow over the next 10-15 years.
My career was built on aligning with digital in 1996, the rise of media as the driving force of agencies in 2000, the importance of data driven algorithmic story telling in 2010, and now the rise of the Company of One powered with the rise of new scale of talent, ideas and marketplaces and the decreasing importance of the scale of resources, distribution and spending.
2) Who you work for is as if not more important than where you work.
Working for a successful company with momentum, name recognition and track record of success helps a career through a halo effect and also signaling that one is good enough to get in and to work at these well regarded and hot firms.
But, ask anybody who you believe has succeeded and most of them will signal the importance of the people they worked for.
The terms you will not hear are boss, manager, supervisor but rather leader, guide, mentor.
For mentorship and leadership the key is to find people who combine three elements:
a) Do they have a great reputation for excellence. Excellent work. Excellent Financial Results. Excellent People working for them. It is easier succeed when one is aligned with excellence and growth.
b) Do they have integrity. Do people use the words trust, candid, authentic, straight-shooter, transparent or similar words when describing them.
c) Do they have a coaching tree. Matt Gibbs who used to work with me and is now a successful leader after having sold the company he co-founded, recently shared a piece on The Coaching Tree of a Head Coach. This is exactly what it sounds like — a visual illustration of who head coaches have mentored and where those folks are now serving as successful head coaches. Those head coaches then have their own branches. And so on.
In the world of athletics, the coaches with a superlative Coaching Tree are considered the best of the best. Not only can they succeed with their own teams, but they can transfer their knowledge and skills to others. 20 of the 32 Coaches in the NFL today are related in some way to Bill Walsh of of the San Francisco 49ers.
Image by Diana Kozlova using Mid Journey
3) Maximize luck by seizing opportunities and thinking positively.
If aligning with a trend and finding a great person to work for are the first two keys, the third is about something that matters a lot in a career and that is somewhat uncontrollable which is luck.
While luck is not under our control we can maximize the opportunities for luck to tap us on our shoulder by saying yes to as many assignments and opportunities as possible even if some seem really questionable.
In 1992, I was offered a role in the Direct Marketing Department of Leo Burnett vs a role in Client Service as the only way to get promoted to an Account Director since there were few openings on the big accounts with too many talented people vying for them.
Direct at that time was not understood by the mainline agency. It was filled with outsiders who spoke of A/B testing, mailing lists and direct to consumer communication. In fact it was so looked down upon that people believed I had doomed my future or was being punished when they found I was on the 34th floor. I therefore answered my calls (lots of calls vs emails those days) with the greeting this is Rishad from the Leper Colony.
Once they finished laughing I also told everybody the future of the marketing and the advertising industry was on 34 ( we were on the 34th floor of the Leo Burnett Building).
Well because of learning about the benefits and challenges of direct, I got the idea of launching the Leo Burnett Interactive Marketing Group with the support of Tom Collinger who ran the Direct area . Then convinced the Leo Burnett Board to “take the name of the door” by closing the Leo Burnett Interactive Marketing Group and launching Giant Step with Adam and Eric Heneghan so we could compete with a digital firms like Modem, Agency.Com, Organic, Digitas and Razorfish vs Leo Burnett’s traditional competitors. A few years later luck came calling via a call from Jack Klues then the head of the lowly back caboose of the agency train (media), asking that I join him and others in the unbundling of Leo Burnett Media to Starcom and launch Starcom IP.
Few hang out in the strange and supposedly less important parts of an organization but it is often there that the future is being forged.
The future comes from the slime, from outsiders, and from the quixotic.
Take a gamble and try your luck on something new and different and it will make all the difference.
4) Never stop learning and never stop growing.
The day you stop being a student is the beginning of the end of your career.
Especially today when knowledge is heading towards being free and the half like of expertise is growing shorter and shorter.
The picture above is the gravestone of Arthur C Clarke who is the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I uploaded the picture with a question mark to ChatGPT and here is what I got:
This is the gravestone of Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (1917–2008), the renowned British science fiction author most famous for works like 2001: A Space Odyssey. The inscription—“He never grew up, but he never stopped growing”—plays on Clarke’s lifelong sense of curiosity and imagination. Despite aging in years, he retained a “childlike” wonder about science, technology, and the mysteries of the universe. The phrase suggests that he kept learning, exploring, and inventing new ideas throughout his life—never losing his inquisitive spirit.
It doesn’t matter how senior or how powerful we are. The world is changing so much that even at this stage I spend an hour-and-a-half a day learning. Invest in continuous learning and education, because otherwise we will find ourselves growing increasingly irrelevant.
I remind senior executives who say they have no time to learn not to worry. Since they are not learning in a time of transformational change soon they will lose their jobs and they will have plenty of time to learn.
This shakes everyone out of their stupor and inertia.
5) Success is driven by the people around us much more than us.
As and when you become truly successful, you will realize that your success has been built on a very benign form of a Ponzi scheme.
You will be successful because the people around you are successful. And you will basically be given some sort of credit for the people around you.
Therefore, make sure that you really, really invest in the people around you because that is investing in yourself in everything, from training to relationships to looking after them and helping them along with their careers.
You can’t succeed, especially as you get more responsibility, unless you do that.
Image by Feliperafaelgilson using Mid Journey
6) Never take yourself too seriously.
Take your work seriously.
Your Clients, Customers and Commitments seriously.
But never take yourself too seriously.
Be humble.
Be approachable.
Laugh at yourself and when people say you’re full of shit, you probably are.
Let them point out the turd on the table of your thinking (it’s not a Brownie, sir, this idea of yours but rather it is excrement!)
Humor is a key.
Another key maybe my new book which will prepare you and your firm for what is coming next! Lots of CEO’s, CTO’s and many more have said so.
Coming Feb 4, 2025 and available for pre-order is my new book. Take a look inside and more here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/rethinking-work
Staying Human in the Age of Data.
A smart and worldly man, Tobaccowala has produced a deeply informed book about brand marketing, data science, and humanity that is a remarkably lively read. Name another book about business (or any other subject) that in one breath urges the reader to acknowledge “the turd on the table” in the boardroom and references François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Joan Didion in the next. - Marketing+Strategy Magazine Best Business Books 2020.
Next month it will be five years (Jan 28, 2020) since my first book was published just before the March 2020 Covid shutdowns. Despite the unfortunate timing and two years of not being able to travel to events to support the book, it ended up selling many tens of thousands of copies and continues to do well notching sales of hundreds of copies every month five years later.
The reason for its continued success is that the ideas and perspectives in every chapter in the book, each of which can be read as a free standing book ( I always wonder why most business books are just one chapter or idea repeated over a dozen chapters) not only have aged well but in many cases are even more relevant today than when the book was issued.
For instance the book had a chapter on AI, Blockchain and Immersive Computing (AR/VR) though it was published five years ago ! The book had a chapter on how to manage cultures and lead when people are working in distributed places staring at screens long before the Covid lockdown. The book makes the case for continuous learning with a chapter on how to upgrade one’s operating system, a chapter on how to manage change so it sucks less and a chapter on why companies that do not have cultures that allow one to call out the turd on the table end up failing and defeating themselves.
Every prediction and perspective from five years ago have come true and people believe the book was written last month! Often I hear how the book has been a competitive edge for many leaders and companies and among the best investment they made for themselves or their teams.
Here is what the Economist Magazine when reviewing a number of business books wrote:
Perhaps the best of the books is Mr Tobaccowala’s. That is because the author, a senior adviser at Publicis Groupe, an advertising and communications firm, has a clear focus: how to ensure you can hire, then inspire, the right workers in the knowledge economy. “Employees who find work meaningful are highly productive, agile and committed,” he writes, adding that talented workers are in a more powerful bargaining position in the current economy. He also argues that companies can be too obsessed with data, and not enough with employee motivation: “The best businesses find ways to marry the math and the magic.”
The book is clearly written and full of sensible and practical suggestions. They include assessing all meetings to eliminate those that waste time and suggesting that all employees spend 20% of each month trying to enhance their skills.
Many people also buy it today because they believe the subtitle of staying human in the age of data is no different than how to stay human in the age of AI.
If the book was a bottle of Japanese or Scotch whisky it should cost more due to its wonderful aging and vintage but instead it is available for just over $8 including shipping on Amazon and Walmart this week.
Here is the Amazon Link. This is the Walmart Link.
I wrote an essay on why people should allocate some of their most valuable resource which is time (rather than a few dollars) reading my book which I have republished below.
So if you are looking for a gift for yourself or your team for this Christmas or want to see how some things never change despite all the hype and swirl of change you might want to read about the issues that were key 5 years ago which seem to be the same today.
Often to succeed in a world of change maybe we should focus on what does not.
Here is the beginning of essay from five years ago. You can read the entire essay and what dozens of leaders wrote about the book and all the places you can get it here
Why Should You Read My Book?
Time is all we have.
So why should you allocate a part of your most precious asset on engaging with this book?
Because my hope is that it will leave you seeing, thinking, and feeling differently about how to grow and remain relevant in transformative times.
How to grow yourself, grow those around you, and grow your practice, passion, or company.
How to remain relevant by understanding what it takes to make sense and thrive in a world of rapid technological, demographic, and global upheaval.
And it will do so by questioning much of what business takes for granted:
• Why data is often not the way forward and we may have too much of it;
• Why change sucks;
• Why having more—rather than fewer—meetings is better; and
• Why it is essential to have a culture and courage that calls out “the turd on the table.”
You not only will learn what makes great leaders but also how to deal with, or not become, a bad boss.
You’ll discover how to extract meaning from data and see poetry in the plumbing.
This book recognizes that while our world is increasingly filled with digital, silicon-based, computing objects, it is populated by people who remain analog, carbon-based, feeling creatures.
People like you.
And me.
Companies can choose to upgrade the skills of their people and reimagine the way they work or swap out their people and acquire new ways of working.
Often both are necessary.
This book is about upgrading the operating systems of people and companies by remembering the thinking-and-feeling component of the operating system.
A central premise is that successful individuals and firms can never forget the importance of people, their emotions, the culture of the organization, and what cannot be measured. I refer to this as the Soul of a Company.
This Soul is critical even as individuals and firms reinvent themselves for an increasingly AI-augmented, data-driven, networked and distributed, screen-based future.
As the world becomes more data driven and real-time twitchy, and as financial markets punish companies for failing to meet their goals, I worry that our short-term focus on numbers is destroying the long-term health of business, countries, and people. I worry we are losing our humanity in a world where modern, data-driven economies and cutting-edge technologies are seeping into all of life.
Yes, results, data, speed, and technology are keys for businesses to remain relevant and thrive. But while they’re necessary, they’re insufficient for long-term success.
Over the past five years, I have seen a significant tilt to the numeric, to the algorithmic, and to the measurable. This causes organizations to think short term, prize individualism, and adopt a mercenary mindset rather than think long term, prize teams, and adopt a meaningful mindset.
Increasingly there is a premium and a dominance on the quantitative, or what I call the spreadsheet, and a diminishment of the importance of the culture, humanity, emotion, and complexity of people, or what I refer to as the story.
Successful people and companies combine the story and the spreadsheet and by doing so restore the soul of business.
Here is the Amazon Link. This is the Walmart Link.
And coming on Feb 4 is my next book which is available for pre-order at all these places: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/rethinking-work
Rishad Tobaccowala has spent four decades rethinking and reinventing and now works across the globe helping leaders, teams and companies thrive in transformational times. More here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/