One of the biggest time wasters in the business world is the conference call.  Whenever there is a decision to be made involving more than two people, a conference call is set up.  Everyone dials in to a phone service that enables five, ten, 20 or more people to all speak at the same time.

 

For anybody who does not regularly participate in conference calls, the best way to understand the experience is to imagine that you are attending a meeting at which you and everybody else is blindfolded.  You can’t be sure who you are talking to, you can’t tell how many people are in the room, and if somebody or perhaps everybody gets up and leaves while you are speaking, you won’t realize until you finish.  

 

If you drone on about Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in an ordinary meeting, you would notice your audience rolling their eyes, checking email on their Blackberrys or simply falling asleep, and this might lead you to skip quickly to the end of your point.  On a conference call on the other hand, you can’t see the impact you are having on the other participants and so have no way of knowing whether your audience is listening to you or playing solitaire on their computers and waiting for you to stop.

 

This evening, at the leisurely time of 10am in New York and the social-life crushing time of 10pm in Hong Kong, I have to give a presentation to an American client on why they should proceed with the transaction we are working on.  Like most bankers, I only get paid my success fee if they actually do the deal.  If they decide not to proceed I get nothing, so this presentation is quite important and I have to do it by conference call.

 

For the first 10 minutes as everybody dials-in all we hear is a succession of introductions: “Hi, this is Bob”, “This is Jim Anderson on the line”, “This Harry calling from New York”, and a few nitwits who dial-in and simply say ”Hello?”.

 

Once I’ve established that everyone who is meant to be there is there, I start my presentation.  What happens then in all those offices around the world is that everybody hits the “mute” button on their phones, sits back in their chairs and puts their feet on the desk.  Some will continue to listen, others will start writing emails, and a few, who don’t like me very much, will start making nasty faces at the phone.  

 

There’s nothing that can be done about this.  It is just a matter of carrying on in the hope that the right people are paying attention.  By asking the audience questions from time to time it is possible to tell who is listening and who isn’t – the people that aren’t listening tend to fumble around and sound a little startled when they hear their name – but giving other people the opportunity to speak can also have the unfortunate side effect of potentially opening up the floor to the loudmouths.

 

The one thing that ruins most conference calls and is unfortunately impossible to control is the loudmouth.  In the business world, you can be smart, you can be dumb, you can be confident, nervous, loud, quiet, whatever.  But that one thing you can’t be is un-noticed.  No matter how brilliant you are, if you are working on a transaction and nobody notices that you are there, then you may as well not be, even if the reason you are not noticed is that you are too busy doing useful work to attend boring meetings.

 

For some reason, the people that have figured this out tend to be the ones that are in fact the most useless.  Strangely, smart people are so often overlooked because they mistake being useful as more important than being noticed.  The conference call, because no-one can see you, tends therefore to bring out the worst in the blowhards who are determined to make an impression, even if they don’t really understand what they are talking about.

And about 20 minutes into my presentation, this is what happens.  One of these overbearing folks gets going and I lose control of the call.  I try my best to interject, but like most phones, the microphone on mine cuts out when there is a sound coming out of the speaker, so I am powerless.

 

Conveniently, this particular mouth on legs is my client, and he is jabbering away about what a brilliant deal this is, partly I suppose because he also realizes that a completed deal, no matter how dumb, looks better on the CV than a failed deal, no matter how smart.

 

I’ve already said quite enough to make an impression anyway, so I put my feet on the desk, sit back, and start playing brick breaker on my Blackberry. The one and only upside of the conference call is that if I can’t see them, then they can’t see me either.