Death, Taxes, and. . . Meetings

Company manager uses meetings as a central forum for discussing new ideas.

Just because they're inevitable doesn't mean they have to be boring, painful, and a waste of everyone's time

When you get beyond the point of handling everything in your company yourself, a critical issue crops up: how do you get everyone moving in the same direction? How do you get them to do what needs to be done without setting up too much structure? In a sense, this is what managing people is all about.

Many well-meaning chief executives create elaborate systems -- state-of-the-art incentives, say, or whizbang training programs. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But when all is said and done, the trick of management is knowing a good, solid idea when you stumble on it. Or so C. E. Steuart Dewar would argue.

Over the past several years Dewar, the 42-year-old founder and president of Dewar Information Systems Corp. (DISC), a Westchester, Ill., supplier of editorial production systems for newspapers, has figured out an effective way to keep people focused. Even as the business grows -- sales are currently around $10 million and there are 65 employees -- he is in close touch with top managers who regularly share ideas with one another and the people who work for them. We're not talking about reports and memos flying back and forth; nor are we looking at a fancy high-tech system. Dewar's secret weapon is none other than the lowly meeting, a weekly powwow of managers.

Mention committee meetings to a lot of seasoned managers, and watch their eyes roll. The complaints almost always involve time -- or, more precisely, what comes or doesn't come from the long hours spent in the conference room. We've all heard the committee jokes -- "a camel is a horse designed by . . ." and so on. But Dewar and his three vice-presidents, DISC's executive committee, disagree. They see their meetings as an efficient mechanism for keeping one another up to date. The weekly meetings are also a forum for addressing the bigger questions -- everything from how to structure the organization to what products the company should be selling.

"We've found," says Ed Houcek, vice-president of sales and marketing, "that a group of people working together can come up with smarter decisions than one individual, no matter who he is." Houcek tells about the time he had a terrific idea for a product to be sold to small printing shops. He was positive it was a good bet -- until they began discussing the plan in the executive-committee meeting. Within an hour he'd been convinced by the vice-president of operations, Richard Secrest, that the product was great, but if they wanted to make money on it, they'd have to target a different customer base -- which is what they ultimately did.

The idea for regular meetings grew out of Dewar's needs three or four years ago. As DISC was growing and adding people, Dewar, a British-born software specialist, found that making decisions was tougher and more time-consuming than he'd expected. As issues came up -- questions about a particular contract, maybe, or a personnel matter -- he'd go around getting the opinion of one individual or another on the problem at hand. But as the business got bigger, the problems got thornier. How should they handle sales commissions? What about benefits? And what kinds of precedents was he setting by doing one thing as opposed to another? It was when the pressures of growth began to crowd out the time he could find to meet with individuals that Dewar set up his executive committee.

Three and a half years later, he and his three vice-presidents are champions of regular meetings, whatever the eye-rolling experience of other chief executives. The four meet every Tuesday, almost always in Dewar's corner office, and typically the meetings run from three to five hours, with one break. When one of the four members is planning to be away, the meetings are rescheduled for the same week, if possible. Why not hold the meeting anyhow? "It's a matter of balance," Dewar explains. "In order to evaluate things fairly, you really want somebody pulling from every perspective."

Even if you buy the argument that Dewar gets better decisions, how does he justify spending so much time in one meeting? Certainly his 60-hour weeks, including one or two days of travel, don't leave him a lot of slack. You have to think about the alternatives, he says. "A good portion of any manager's time is spent communicating with other people. It's a lot more efficient to get people together once than to do it piecemeal." Although it's hard to quantify, he's convinced that the meetings actually save time. "There's less redundancy. And we can anticipate potential troubles so we don't have to spend as much time solving problems that shouldn't have come up in the first place."

To illustrate his point, Dewar describes a situation that could have turned into a real headache a couple of years ago. The company had spent a lot of money on developing some new products, which left it short of cash for the traditional year-end pay increases. To make matters worse, some new hires had been given commitments about raises that the company couldn't meet on schedule. Dewar, after the executive-committee discussion, met one-on-one with the people most affected, explained the situation, and asked for their patience. He got it, and the company paid up in six months.

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