A while back I asked if you wanted to attend another meeting. The idea was that it is worth taking time to monitor the most important thing to do. Not convinced?

Well, I like the following quote from the Chairman and CEO of Societe Generale. He leads one of the world’s biggest banks, which has 154,000 employees.

“Because we are a service company, our principal differentiator is our people. I am very happy to see the progress our employees have made around client satisfaction. For example, the branches have decided to close for a half hour to an hour every week to discuss and monitor their progress on client satisfaction. The decision to close was a very difficult one, because obviously it meant less access for our clients. However, the branches are very pleased with the management benefit this time provides them. Some branches only have three or four employees, so they rarely, if ever, had time to meet as a team. In the end, I think this illustrates our people’s commitment to the vision, because their decision involved risk and they were able to see that the benefit outweighed that risk.”

Apparently, it is more important to close your business for 30 minutes a week to figure out if you are doing the right thing the other 39.5 hours, than it is to keep going because there is too much work to do. I find myself agreeing with this. Two key questions for all of us:

1. What is the goal that we are trying to achieve?
2. Are we achieving it?