Years ago, I read a book entitled The One Minute Manager by M Spencer Johnson, M.D. and Ken Blanchard. I followed it up with The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. As I recall, I was younger at the time and I was pretty sure that, with just a bit of effort, I could single-handedly shift the earth’s axis of rotation. At least, that is, if I was not expected to handle everyone else’s problems at the same time. That monkey business, therefore, meant something to me. Apparently, I was not alone. Meets the Monkey made it big. Pretty soon there was the full and exhaustive One Minute Manager Library, a colossus that covered a spread approximately equal to the Ottoman Empire.

According to legend, a short while after the OMM became a phenomenon, the good doctor went through some personal stuff. He created the story of Who Moved My Cheese? to help him deal with a difficult change in his life, “learning”, say the promos “how to take his changing situation seriously without taking himself seriously” and, eventually, turning a negative into a positive.

Who Moved My Cheese? is a simple story about two guys and two mice and how they had to deal with cheese being moved around in a maze. Two decades after the story was created, Who Moved My Cheese? was finally published. It became a #1 international bestseller, with one million hardcover copies in print within the first sixteen months and over ten million copies within the next two years.

Cheese Wiz

Critics of the book say that the story is simple enough for a child to understand and that it insults their intelligence. Simple it is. And insulting it is. Even allowing for the child-like drawings of cheese (you know… Swiss-style wedges with holes) that are strategically placed as filler between thoughts, there is not enough substance here to fill a… well… a ham and cheese sandwich.

The author claimed that it is not what is in the story of Who Moved My Cheese? but how you interpret it and apply it to your own situation that gives it value. I hope so, because there is virtually nothing in the story. If you are determined to part with a twenty, find a homeless person in the street and hand it over. Look closely at both your circumstances and see if you come away with anything of value. It is likely you will and, best of all, the twenty you part with is almost assuredly money better spent than had you bought the cheese book.

Cheese is touted as the world’s #1 book on change and Johnson the world’s #1 business author. Ridiculous hyperbole…unless you are referring to sales $. Then it’s just ridiculous.

Here’s the Poop

We move from the paper thin veneer of pop business culture to the thicker one of poop culture. Kirk Weisler, who is managing to carve himself a neat career as a motivational speaker, also draws from real life in his narrative, The Dog Poop Initiative.

The ‘essence’ of the story, done in rhyme, is that a dog poops on a soccer field. Coaches, refs and little tykes play around it. Finally, one coach takes the initiative and picks up the offending lump. To quote, “The Scoopers take the initiative and are the ones who lead the way. They make the field a better place for all the rest to play.” There you have it. All of it. Leadership in a nutshell, so to speak.

At least the drawings are cute.

I admit to having attitude. But then I also admit to having standards. I probably shouldn’t be so crotchety about this thing, but I believe that if business people are going to commit valuable time and hard-earned money to reading, they should be rewarded with substance, something that passes for original insight, and at least a smidgeon of scholarship.

I’ve nothing against best-sellers. But spend the time with those who’ve taken the time. You want to change your life? Try Stephen Covey. You want to change your company? Read Jim Collins. There are just too many good books, serious writers and deep insights out there to waste your time on poorly written pap put out by cynical publishers.

My last post (Chaos Theory and the Economy) looked at the ripple effect of what might, to the untrained eye, look like isolated events and localized market dynamics. These ripples sweep outwards in ever widening circles, washing over near everything in their paths, capsizing anything not large enough or small enough to ride the waves. The chaos doesn’t just roll outwards, however; it reaches up and trickles down as well. The trickle is, actually, more of a crunch.

There is a story worth telling that speaks to the trickle-down effect. One plain-talking CEO I knew, during a break in a tough round of labor negotiations, decided to get personal. He dropped in on the union leadership and told its members that while the company was owned by shareholders, the plant they were representing ultimately belonged to the workers. The Board was far away. He, as CEO, would likely move on in one year, three years, maybe five at the outside. But most of the workers had been with the plant for decades and few were about to leave any time soon. They had helped build it and they had made it run through the good times and bad.

If these negotiations were to lead to a shutdown, he told them, a strike would impact their future and the future of their families far more than it possibly could him. They had few options now and would have fewer options were the plant to close. In the current environment and with outsourcing now an economically and politically viable option, a shutdown – and even permanent closure – was a real possibility. This little chat was a break in protocol; there were certainly all sorts of reasons why it was a bad idea. At the very least, it could be construed as a threat. I knew this CEO, though. It wasn’t a threat; it was a plea.

As it happened, the union missed his point. The employees walked out. The company then kept them out long enough for it to really hurt.

I tell this story not to decry union tactics in this particular case…or in any other, for that matter. It is not meant as a commentary on the GM/UAW negotiations…which just happened to be mentioned in the first Chaos Theory post. I relate this story because this particular CEO was stating what I have learned over the years to be an important truth. As the economy slowly but steadily sinks, companies will – as they must – rationalize their operations. Plants will close. Workers will lose their jobs. Their fates are inextricably tied. And so, when it comes, the wave will swamp not just the plant, but its workers and their families. The chaos will have become very specific before it inevitably becomes general.

“The field of consciousness is tiny”, wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupery. “It accepts only one problem at a time.” Would that the economy were so accommodating. The bad news keeps popping up as if the economy were a giant Whack A Mole gopher bash game.

Well before the nuclear blast that was the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, well before the subsequent fall-out spreading like Mt. St. Helen’s ash over the U.S. economy, there were troubling signs. One by one, we were seeing the elements fall into place for a perfect storm.

We focus on the super novas, like the JPMorgan acquisition of Bear Stearns Cos that sent analysts into a tailspin, but what I have found most worrisome are plant closings being announced with unsettling relentlessness and regularity.

There are the biggees. General Motors, for example, has a plan to close or eliminate shifts in a dozen plants as part of a plan to cut 30,000 hourly jobs in the U.S. and Canada by the end of 2008. The controversial agreement recently signed with the United Auto Workers union not only sanctions the closings, but lays the groundwork for drastic wage cuts and opens the door to further unsettling moves.

And then there are the smaller, less known punches to the economic gut. Pilgrim’s Pride, the largest chicken processor in the U.S., is closing a chicken processing complex and six of its 13 distribution centers. The catalyst is soaring feed-ingredient costs resulting from a surge in corn-based ethanol production.

This post is not going to question the corporate strategies that hinge return to profitability on cost-cutting. That is an issue for another day. What I do wish to point out here is that none of these cuts occur in isolation.

As the Pilgrim’s Pride closings indicate, downstream effects, near invisible to the untrained eye, are taking their toll. The chaos theory applies to the economy. With oil profits soaring in a way that gives additional bite to the term ‘crude’, refiners are investing in cokers and other technology to maximize their yield from each barrel . High value extractions like ethanol are being favored in the refining process. As we have seen, this hurts the chicken industry, for one. It also means that the availability of Bunker C (heating oil) as well as paving and roofing asphalt will be diminished and that their costs will also rise dramatically. And, with the rules of supply and demand being adhered to with religious fervor, the cost of natural gas and other oil alternatives will most assuredly keep pace. Plant operating costs will continue their upward trajectory.

The escalating cost of gasoline has, of course, been especially hard on truckers, who also have to contend with reduced backhauls in a downturn economy. To say nothing of regulatory changes and enhanced security measures. For trucking companies to survive, they will have to pass on these costs and inconveniences to customers. Logistics will prove an increasingly troublesome challenge.

With the housing bubble burst and demand for building materials down dramatically, we have seen the shutdown of numerous lumber and OSB (Oriented Strand Board or waferboard) mills. With the closure of sawmills, there are less wood chips available. There is also less recycled paper available thanks to, among other things, increased consumption by the Chinese. The combination makes things tough for manufacturers of LDF wall board and MDF furniture who have also been hit by the downturn in housing expenditures. This downturn is, of course, related to the mortgage mess and the resultant tightening of credit. It is also a reflection of growing consumer nervousness engendered by continuing bad economic news, including plant closures.

And so on.

There is an intertwining of relationships between industries and a cascading of effects as a result of each change in any one industry’s fortunes. We can see the overall impact of all these linkages, but the subtleties are not as obvious as they are telling.

People talking without speaking
People listening without hearing.

Remember those lines from Paul Simon’s The Sound of Silence? Obviously, he had been to one too many company meetings.

A quick corner-of-the-napkin calculation says that I have survived in the range of 7,000 meetings over the course of my career. Somewhere around the 4,000 mark, I figured things out. You might think, therefore, that I’m slow but, hey, I was in a meeting.

So, here is one veteran’s Top 10 take-aways on meetings and facsimiles thereof.

1. Meetings are neither good things nor bad things. But, depending on your objectives, they can be necessary or unnecessary things. So when you are planning a meeting, begin by asking yourself these questions: Why have a meeting at all? Can we achieve what we need more efficiently and more effectively in another way?

2. What kind of meeting is this going to be? Brainstorming sessions are not the same as information sessions are not the same as planning sessions. The objectives are different; therefore, the organization of the meetings should be different, as should their participants.

3. So, who should be invited? Only those that have to be. This is, apparently, not as obvious as one would imagine. The tendency is to invite everyone and anyone who is remotely attached to the issue at hand or remotely related to someone else who, by invitation or by chance, will also be at the meeting. There is more fear of insulting someone by leaving him or her out than there is of having the wrong people or too many people involved in the first place. This is not a quilting bee. The only people you should worry about insulting are the people who actually should be there; you don’t want to waste their time. Oh yeah, the maximum number of people at a meeting: seven.

4. There should be an agenda prepared for any meeting, no matter how small. If you deem an agenda superfluous, then so, likely, is the meeting. An agenda, sent out in a timely fashion, ensures people come to the meeting prepared and makes clear the purpose of the meeting and its desired outcome.

5. Meetings can easily meander, with conversations wandering off in different directions. There should be one key objective going in and one major accomplishment coming out…which is achieving the key objective. Get what you need out of a meeting or get out of the meeting. There has to be a single-mindedness about this. Anyone who is of two minds on the subject should not be invited and certainly not invited back. I am reminded of this line from comedian Fred Allen: A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done. You’ve got one objective. Get it done.

6. To make sure there is no meandering, there should be a facilitator at every meeting. Most people assume that the chairman should play the role of facilitator; after all, it is the chair’s meeting. Wrong! You can’t play leader, scribe and facilitator at the same time. You may be the mouthpiece of the project, but you shouldn’t have to be its eyes and ears. The facilitator will make sure the meeting starts and ends on time, will keep the meeting on track (i.e., stay on topic), will stop side conversations, will ensure everyone gets a chance to speak, and will take notes so that no good idea gets lost. The facilitator is invaluable.

7. Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits. Apply his dictum from Thomas Edison to meetings…or, more precisely, to between meetings. People must meet their commitments, must do their assignments. I have seen teams energized and I have seen projects grind to a halt simply because someone did or did not complete a pivotal assignment. In other words, the between time is as important as the meeting time itself. You don’t want to have to have a meeting (as I have had) to agree that you agreed on something at your last meeting.

8. Be aware of each meeting’s dynamics, which really means, be aware of the people dynamics going on in each meeting. These change in dramatic but predictable ways when senior managers are present. It is important for managers to subordinate their ideas until others have had a chance to speak and that, if others speak, said managers do not shoot down or shrug off suggestions or even offer yes-but-wouldn’t-it-be-better-if improvements.

9. Meetings are to be survived and to do so sometimes means you’ve got to find a way to amuse yourself with the small things. I love whiteboards. I dislike laser pointers. I hate arrangements where table legs get in the way of mine. Speaking of legs, though, I have to admit to being a student of seating protocol. And seating habits. Where people sit is predictable and, as it turns out, inviolable. Okay, so the boss sits at the head of the table, opposite the drop-down screen. Others jockey for position and eventually sit where they sit. As time passes, you will notice that where they sit is where they always sit. Just as you will sit where you always sit. Seating is a security blanket, so if someone sits in someone else’s seat, there inevitably ensues a bizarre dance of the lost, a silly milling about. Like I said, be amused.

10. Lunches have become a staple of the North American meeting diet. Lunches meaning pizza and barbecue chicken. Not meaning tuna and bell pepper pockets. They say armies march on their bellies. So do meeting participants. Feed them wisely, which means that if the meeting continues after lunch, do not feed them too well. Nothing slows down a meeting like having all its participants take a communal nap.

So there you have it: 10 things to note for your next meeting of the minds.