A Quote on Meetings
Recently, I found myself in an internet debate with someone over a Peter Drucker quote. Before going into the details, I’d like to mention that Mastodon is really not that different from Twitter; it really is the people that create the atmosphere, not the protocol or owner. Also, the “debate” ended up being pretty one-sided; I found that there really is no point in playing chess with pigeons. Anyway. I’m grateful there’s a block list.
The quote goes like this: "Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization[.] For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time."
Of course, my take on meetings is a very different one, and I don’t appreciate oversimplifications of the matter. The quote, without any context, certainly reeks of oversimplification. All the details of my brief pigeon chess episode aside, I ended up reading relevant parts of the original source of the quote, Drucker’s 1966 book “The Effective Executive”, because I wanted to understand the background. The quote is from chapter 2.
Since the book is about “executives”, let’s establish clarity about whom Drucker is writing. In his words from chapter 1: "Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an “executive” if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform or to obtain results." This clarifies that Drucker’s term “executive” includes knowledge workers with the quoted capabilities, not just people from the higher echelons of management.
In other words, the notion of “meeting” applied here is broader than “executive board meeting”. That’s really important to know, because the assumption now is that - slightly simplifying - whoever spends any time in a meeting is wasting time, always, with apodictic certainty. Since I have earlier branded this kind of take on meetings as nonsensical, the quote warrants a closer look.
Here it is, again, including some sentences following it: "Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization[.] For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time. In an ideally designed structure (which in a changing world is of course only a dream) there would be no meetings. … We meet because people holding different jobs have to cooperate to get a specific task done."
In other words, Drucker is describing a utopia and blames reality for not being that utopia. He immediately concedes that, to get work done, knowledge workers need to cooperate: a truism. This cooperation takes place in: meetings. And it is, consequently: work.
Drucker may be a management guru, but that piece, right there, is just plain incoherent. And 1966 is long, long ago. I'm done playing chess with pigeons.
Tags: work