ABSTRACT
Once I had to watch the executive team of a large pharmaceutical firm slog through a two-hour business update meeting. Sounds dull? If you weren’t a shareholder in this company, then, yes, that meeting would have been painfully dull. However, if you were a shareholder, then you would have been totally infuriated. These executives bickered, didn’t listen to each other, failed to make any decisions, avoided key issues, got lost on tangents, and wasted a lot of time. As I was sitting next to their Human Resources director, I asked her if she could give me a rough idea of the annual salary levels represented around that executive table. I did the mental math and came up with a per-hour salary cost for that team of close to $1,500. Did the company’s shareholders get $3,000 of value for that meeting? I’m sure that they would have unanimously voted “no!”
