204 THE CREATIVE INVESTMENT TEAM
The same is true of ideas. If the process is clearly defined, then
participants understand the sequence. First ideas will be generated,
without criticism, and then they will be evaluated. The process flows
rather smoothly.
The consulting firm that I mentioned earlier, Interaction Asso-
ciates (IA), has been teaching organizations how to make meetings
work for more than 20 years. In fact, the founders of IA, Michael
Doyle and David Straus, literally wrote the book on it: How to
Make Meetings Work (Dell 1976). IA’s research has shown that 90
percent of the problems with meetings are process-related rather
than content-related. The example that IA uses to make this point
is cooking an egg. The egg is the content and the process could be
one of many: boiling, scrambling, frying, and so on. To prove this
point in the classroom, IA trainers will ask participants to name all
the problems that make for bad meetings. Participants respond with
a long list of items: no agenda, arriving late, losing focus, too long,
sidebar discussions, no clear outcomes, no follow-through, and so
forth. When the trainers then ask participants to state whether these
problems involve processes or content, invariably the response is
“process.” In other words, meeting participants usually agree on
what to discuss (content), but they differ on how to discuss it. Hence,
meetings go awry and live down to the reputation chronicled in
Dilbert cartoons: horribly inefficient wastes of time. It’s a small
wonder that Warren Buffett says the best meeting he attends each
week is the one with himself in his mirror.
Tools (processes) are important enablers of creativity. This may
sound painfully obvious to readers, but my experience with inves-
tors is that they are very unsophisticated with regard to meeting
technology. In fact, many investment meetings are the equivalent
of eating with your fingers and tossing the bones on the floor. I’ve
been in investment meetings where the attendees weren’t even in-
troduced to one another; there was no agenda; no use of visuals to
help create common understanding; no clear roles (such as who is
facilitating the meeting); long, boring downloads of information;14-25 ware 204 1/19/01, 1:16 PM