Today, the very word 'meeting' conjures up images of time wasted in badly lit, airless offices. People sitting around tables unsure why they are there and wishing they were somewhere else. Hour after hour. Day after day.
David Pearl can change that and in this book he shows how you can take back control of your working life.
"Will There Be Donuts?" is about a big mistake that almost all companies are going to make this year. And the next. And the one after that. We'll call it nearly meeting.
It happens the length and breadth of the business world, from boardroom to shop floor.
'Will There Be Donuts?' is business expert David Pearl's first book and he draws on his 2 decades of consulting with some of the biggest companies in the world to re-educate the reader on how to hold meetings and, crucially, how to make them great.
His client list is a who's who of FTSE and NYSE names and they seek his advice on how to engage employees at every level to make their meetings more efficient, effective and engaging.
His list of achievements in the field includes:
• Identifying £30million of savings by changing ineffective meetings at GSK.
• Persuading the CEO of Skandia International to saw through his boardroom table.
• Showing the Department of Work & Pensions that having your mobile phone on in a meeting could be seen as a good thing.
At every level of an organisation, not just the very top. if your meetings are ineffective then it's likely that your business is too. "Will There Be Donuts?" will reinvigorate you as a person and as an employer/employee.
Consider the following:
You are in a role which requires you to attend three hours of meetings a day. Let's say you'd score those meetings 70% effective. Let's also imagine there are 100 people like you in the company and that your average wage is £60k.
You personally just wasted 5 whole weeks in meeting time this year. Your company lost a combined 2500 days of productivity; that's the equivalent of 11 person-years costing the company £675,000. What's more, if you were to continue at this rate for a conventional career, you'd be burning a total of 9 years, 6 months and 3 days of your working life. All for the sake of some ineffective meetings.
"Will There Be Donuts?" will help you reclaim your working life.