“When you first believe a thing to be true, your first responsibility is to do everything you can to disprove it.”

• Dr. Kary Mullis (b. 1944 – 2019), Winner of 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

This is going to be a Roy H. Williams week. So, get ready to be a better message maker, marketer, and maybe more smarter than you were Sunday night. Subscribe to The Monday Morning Memo. Just do it, and send me some sort of formal thank you or an elaborate gift later.

It’s also gonna be a long post. Hold this thought through it. How resilient is your strategy for your business or career? How much will it help to have some insight so that you can build contingencies based on what is likely to happen?

On the first page of the Preface of Roy’s 2012 book, Pendulum; How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future, Dr. Mullis talks about the fundamentals of basic science. Real scientists, you see take the approach outlined above. “Too often,” he says, “a scientist will develop a hypothesis and then look for supporting evidence.”

Roy readily admits that some things have changed since the book was published, yet his research goes back three-thousand years, and he explains that we live in forty year cycles. Yes, I know that Social Media makes it seem like we live in 40-second cycles, but hang with me here.

To dumb it down, we rotate between “Me Cycles” (I’m not ok, you’re ok…) and “We Cycles” (I’m ok, you’re not ok…). For Me Cycles, think “Hero Worship,” and for “We Cycles” think “Witch Hunt.” (You should read the book, but I’m gonna take a Ruthian swing at it this week…)

Me Cycles are, not ironically, about the individual. I demand freedom of expression, I believe ____________ is wiser than a million other men, I have big dreams and I had better be “Number One” in my life / world / purview.

We Cycles are about the group, the team, the tribe. We cycles applaud personal accountability, seek a better world, believe that a million men are wiser than one man, and demand conformity for the common good.

Guess which cycle we’re in? Not fair, we’re right, smack-dab in the middle…

2003 – 2023 represented a 20-year upswing into a “We Cycle.” It’s at this point of the book that Roy says “Opie don’t live in Mayberry anymore.” He talks about the elimination of the carefree days we (as kids) might have experienced at the expense of them “becoming a savvy, streetwise generation that was never given a chance to be naive.”

According to historical trends, 2023 – 2043 will be a downswing into a Me Cycle. Predictions include a “continuing erosion of public education. ” Another suggests a backlash against organizers of religion whose messages revolve around money, a backlash against political power, tortured efforts and commitment to re-establishing and sustaining a middle class, and creating a new pathway to wealth.

People want to call these unprecedented times. Pendulum says they ain’t. And it’s worth the read.

“The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.”

• Thomas Sowell (b. 1930) American economist

Wrapping up the week on meetings.

Reduce the number. Of meetings, and attendees.

Increase the focus and purpose.

Plan for and execute well on the meetings you insist on holding.

Cancel if the agenda sucks.

Expect people to come prepared.

If they don’t, get better people.

We are the sum of what we produce, not what we talk about.

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

• John Maxwell (b. 1947), American leadership icon, author, speaker, and pastor

So, as we reach the 80% point of a weeklong rant about meetings, let’s get to the nitty gritty.

No, not THAT nitty gritty!

The most important meetings we participate in are the one-on-ones we have with the people we lead. So, let’s get them right.

• 1) Make it about THEM.
• 2) Ask first about feelings, then about facts.
• 3) Make the agenda them-focused. What’s on YOUR mind? How are YOU feeling?
• 4) Hit on no more than three previously agreed-upon metrics.
• 5) Ask how you can help.
• 6) Either do what’s asked, or make sure they understand what you will or won’t do on their behalf.
• 7) Covey: Seek first to understand, then be understood.

The most valuable insight we get from the market should come from the people we’ve placed closest to the market. Don’t allow your one-on-ones to become sermons or directives. Save directives for last measures and save sermons for the folks who went to seminary.

I’ll send you my “almost copyrighted” one-on-one template if you’d like. Just let me know in the reply box below if you’d like it.

^{Almost? Do you know how much it costs to get over that last hurdle to copyright? Doh! If you’re really ready to get busy, I’ll also send you my equally-almost-copyrighted sales interview template!}

“He’s got a hangover that would kill a small animal…”

• Any member of our Loyal Band of Idiots, referring to any other member who’d over-imbibed the night before, circa 1987 – 1994

Yes, the Loyal Bank of Idiots went at it hard from time to time, and the hangovers, while difficult back then, are unthinkable now. So, we’ve adjusted behaviors, although we’d prefer you not use the term “grown up…” (shudder).

So, why not recognize the cost of bad meeting hangovers? Most businesses still seem committed to the effects but not willing to address the cause.

Harvard Business Review (you still haven’t subscribed? C’mon, people!) has a great piece titled The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers. (February 12)

The numbers are compelling: 28% of meetings leave employees with “lingering negative effects.” Many last the rest of the day or longer. HBR defines the hangover as “a period of diminished focus, motivation, or productivity following a bad meeting.”

“Leaders, huddle up! Here’s our play: Let’s do something, several times a day that will de-motivate our teams and make them less productive and focused! Cool?” On, two. BREAK!”

Those are the plays we’re calling. 90% of respondents to the study say they suffer bad meeting hangovers. 47% cite weakened relationships with co-workers. 36% vent to others (the dreaded meeting-after-the-meeting) and 27% admitted to doing so (essentially) every time.

Causes:

• Irrelevant topics, Lack of a Clear Agenda or Objectives — dang near 60%
• Poor time management (filling the time with meeting) 53%
• Lack of actionable outcomes or follow-up 48%

_{I could list a bunch more, but HBR prefers I not republish their stuff without permission…}

The average time impact is two hours or longer. Many say they take the effect home. Do we realize the number of dogs being kicked because we run crappy meetings? The SPCA is watching, Difference Makers!

Please read Monday and Tuesday’s posts. Then, reduce the number of attendees at 96.3% of our meetings. Make agenda action plans instead.

Oh, and subscribe to HBR. It will make you a maker of a more significant difference.

One-on-ones tomorrow.

We’ll put a pretty bow on this ugly topic on Friday.

Make it a great day.

“You should never go to a meeting or make a phone call without a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.”

• Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011), co-founder and two-time CEO of Apple

Welcome back to a week-long rant about meetings. For the benefit of your business. For the sake of your sanity. And, candidly, for the love of Pete!

I led a $120 million Group of a public company for a few years, and every stinking Monday at 10 AM the entire executive team would meet for close to two hours to go over our forecasts with a fine-toothed comb, as the old saying goes. Forecasts are critical, maybe even more so for publicly-traded companies. I quit going to the meeting (Named “Monday Life Suck” in private) three weeks into my six-year tenure.

Four weeks later, my boss called and asked why I’d missed four straight forecast calls. “It’s all right there in the report,” I told him. “C’mon Hes! You can hear Randy and Mike go through their forecasts, as well,” he pleaded. “Randy and Mike and I talk about our business all the time,” I said, “usually right before we publish our forecasts every Friday at 2 PM.”

The expectation was that we would attend a meeting whose sole purpose was for highly paid executives to read spreadsheets. To each other! For 120 minutes! And we usually ran at least thirty minutes long! And after usually starting eight minutes late. For those of you doing the math, ten people, 1580 minutes, zero productivity. Bupkus. Nada. Nothing, other than time to daydream about ways to harm ourselves as an alternative to the meeting.

Here’s a better expectation for a forecast meeting: “Team, the forecasts have been in your inbox since Friday at 2 PM. Monday at 10 AM, please bring two questions about every other member of the team’s forecast. The order of review is in the agenda. We will stay on time. Get deep. Probe. Look for ways to enhance the business or for gaps in data that make you wonder. Let’s make each other better. Please post your questions by 9:30 Monday before the meeting. The presenter can pick one, one of you can pick one and I’ll pick one. We’ll limit each review to ten minutes. Follow-up actions and outcomes should be listed in your forecast for Friday.”

Here’s a better expectation for your operations meeting: “Team, it looks like we slipped below 90% for on-time project completion. Let’s discuss why that happened, and for each possible cause, bring at least one solution or means of addressing it. We’ll limit the meeting to fifty minutes, and we’ll start and end on time.”

Here’s a better expectation for your _____________ meeting:

• It will start on time, with only those necessary in attendance, and with a clear, prior-released agenda.
• It will have a clearly defined, quantifiable objective.
• Each person will be expected to participate and will have completed defined pre-work or research for the meeting.
• Disagreement or challenges will be expected, encouraged, and drawn-out if not offered.
• Decisions will be made.
• Action will be prescribed.
• The method by which the action will be measured will be agreed upon.

Ideally, it will be scheduled to start at five minutes past the hour and end in the shortest time possible to cover the agenda and expectations. Ending at :25 or :55 past the hour gives people time to go potty before their next meeting, which won’t be as good as yours if you follow these basics.

Meeting the boss’s expectations is important, and it will be easier for your team to meet expectations if you expect all meetings to follow these guidelines—and that they actually do.

Tomorrow, the costs of the hangover from bad meetings. Stay tuned!

“If you had to describe in one word why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”

–     Dave Barry (b. 1947), American humorist who understands the life-sucking-effect of bad meetings

This is provable, but I’m only going to put one link in the post, which we’ll revisit on Wednesday.

I bet 93.789% of all meetings fit the description of “bad meetings.”  If you’re the betting type, take the over on that! Before we dive in, let’s define a meeting as “a scheduled interaction between three or more people.”  (One-on-ones will be broken down later this week…)

Meetings should be used to debate and decide, not to share information.  

There are plenty of channels and tools for information sharing.  Don’t waste meeting time on what should be in a report, a portal, or otherwise shared in advance.

If You’re The One Calling the Meeting:

1)  Make sure the purpose is clear.  A good meeting has an outcome.

2)  Make sure the agenda maps to the outcome.  A good meeting has an agenda set in advance that guides the discussion.

3)  Make sure that everyone knows what preparation they need to do before the meeting and what their role in the meeting is.  A good meeting comes with clear expectations.

If You’re Invited to / Required to Attend the Meeting:

1)  Expect to know the purpose and desired outcome, in advance.

2) Insist on an agenda and to understand your role and what preparation you need to complete to be productive in the meeting.

3)  Do the pre-work.  Research.  Prepare.  Then, when the meeting starts, engage and participate.  Map your thoughts and words to the outcome described in #1.

If The Meeting Doesn’t Have A Purpose, Agenda and Prep Work…

1)  If you’re the organizer, cancel it.

2)  If you’re the invitee, decline it or request that it be postponed until you have what you need to make it a good use of everyone’s time.

3)  Seek the “Why?” answers with your teammates.  “Why don’t we know what we want to get out of this time together?”  “Why are we meeting at all if we don’t have an agenda?”

OK, OK, here’s a second link: Patrick Lencioni’s “Death by Meeting,” is worthwhile perspective.

“Most things in life are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. Most things just are.”

• Dr. Tom Graf, the second most quoted dude in the Diff

I was missin’ me some Dr. Graf, and had him teed up for this morning, anyhow, and then the Wise Colonel in our Friday Morning Lion Chaser’s Men’s Bible Study drove it home.

Paraphrasing, he said, with his quiet intensity: “Why do we focus so much time and energy trying to control how other people respond instead of on how we respond.”

As a group study, we’re in Ephesians and talking about anger – righteous or otherwise – and how we’re instructed to eradicate it from our lives, or at least have heightened awareness and resistance to it.

“Don’t go to bed angry.” This is not just good advice for interacting with our coworkers, employees, kids, spouses or partners—it’s Biblical. And it applies to our work-a-day lives, too. Don’t step out of the meeting angry. Don’t go to the next meeting angry about the last one. Don’t let anger color the way we deal with those with whom we are not angry.

Better yet, don’t get angry, especially if our anger is more about our ego or pride than whatever else might be behind it. And understand that our anger is likely more about our ego or pride than whatever else we think might be behind it.

Jefferson said, “Our disappointments in life are almost always tied to our expectations and rarely to our circumstances.” Dr. Graf would probably say, “Right, Tom, old boy, because most things in life are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. Most things just are.”

As Difference Makers, it will always come down to what we do next.

“How many of you drove a different route to the office today for no reason? Just because you could?”

• Steve Heston when beginning The Heston Group’s Purposeful Change session

In 35 years, maybe ten hands have gone up in reply to that question. I was the first to arrive at the office for many years, no matter where I worked. One co-worker actually apologized for parking “in my spot” when he’d left his car there overnight. I hadn’t noticed.

Why is this topic bubbling to the top this week? Here in central Iowa, we’re facing historic cold temperatures, and the kitchen pipes in the new Dad Pad have been frozen since Sunday. It’s amazing to me how much I’ve had to think instead of just do. The coffee pot has to be filled in the bathtub (it won’t fit under the bathroom sink faucet). Instead of washing my cast iron skillet in the bathtub, I did a three-day fast.

As leaders, it’s important to remember that our teams resist or avoid change even when they’ve got no reason. And they’re usually uncomfortable with it when they have a reason.

So, we help them navigate. We signal early and often. We create an environment where they’re encouraged to try new things, new ways, new ideas.

Ideas are the currency of Difference Makers. And ideas often lead change or are prompted by forced change.

I really want a steak, and it looks like Saturday night I should have water so I can break out the cast iron skillet again. In the meantime, I’m down six pounds, I’m getting work done, and I’m drinking less coffee, which may be why I’m sleeping better.

All because the kitchen pipes in the new Dad Pad are frozen. A “forced change” that helps me realize that it ain’t that big of a deal.

^{Editors Note: I dare you to drive a different route to work tomorrow and tell me what you notice that you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.}

“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

• The most repeated line in Horton Hears A Who, by Dr. Suess

And so, too, is a plan. In fact, the best plans start out small. Small plans can be strung into larger plans and then strategies can be executed, evaluated and shifted or doubled-down upon.

It’s peculiar to see people resist planning. “Trust me,” they might say. “I’ll get the work done.”

“I can’t because you won’t.”

Better plan: “What is the work you’re going to do this week? How will you know if you’re doing it? How will I know you’re doing it? How will you know if you’re doing it well? Doing the right things? (Remember, doing the right things wronger is better than doing the wrong things righter!) How will you know to move things to next week if you don’t know what things you didn’t get done this week?”

Goals are only goals if they’re written down and have timeframes attached. Plans are only plans if they can be objectively and measurably related to those goals.

Generals know there’s a war to win, and they tend to fight it one hill at a time, even though there’s a bigger plan and more hills. Coaches know there’s a game to win, and the first 15 plays of that game are usually scripted, planned, and then measured to know which plays they’ll run the rest of the game. Cash flow managers know that collecting payments is essential, and they plan to get the cash in before paying their own obligations. Sales leaders know how many deals they need to get to a number. Grocery store managers know when the lettuce goes bad so they can mark it down and recover some of the cost before it gets stinky.

Even God had (and still has) a plan. And He could probably have “winged it” if anyone ever could.

But if we ain’t God (and we ain’t), let’s write down today’s plan (and this week’s plan), measure it, and then adjust as we go forward. Otherwise, we won’t go forward; we’ll go in circles — ever-tightening circles until we disappear up our own — well, you know.

Plan. Rinse. Repeat. Get better every day.

“I should have thrown the curve ball…”

• Steve Heston, 1980, after surrendering a monstrous home run during my tryout for the University of Iowa baseball team

Last player cut. Based on that one pitch. 0-2 count, two straight spectacular fastballs, swings and misses, and I thought “there’s no way he thinks I’m throwing him a third straight fastball.” It turns out the senior, #3 hitter for the Hawkeyes figured out that this stupid freshman was just cocky enough to throw him a third straight fastball. He hit it so far, it landed about two stalls over from where we tailgate 45 years later. And it landed about four days ago. High. Far. Like it was launched from a mortar. (Can you tell I still might not be over it?)

But I should be…right?

And therein lies the problem.

The word “should.”

Should has very few (if any) positive connotations. Used in the past tense, it’s ultimately futile. No matter how much I think I want to, I can’t return to September 1980 and throw the kid a curve ball. No matter how much I’ve convinced myself over the 45 years since that day, I have no idea if it would have been the right thing to do. And I won’t. Ever. Know.

Used in the present tense, it’s counterproductive. “I should probably start over.” “I should think about changing jobs.” “I should give my boss a piece of my mind.” “I should apologize for being late this morning…”

Should you? The word itself sets everything back. It’s a ginormous rearview mirror where a windshield is supposed to be.

In the present tense, it’s completely passive. “I should get back in the gym.” “I should do dry January.” “I should skip dessert.” (Digression alert! Dry January? Um, no thank you. January sucks and a sip of good whiskey can’t hurt that much…)

In the past tense, let it lie. In the present tense, decide and do. And in the future tense, replace “should” with “will.”

It’s not that it should make a difference. It absolutely will. (See what I did there?)