and this guy, that you sort of recognize from down the hall,

walks right into your cubicle and he steals your chair!

Doesn’t say a word, just rolls away with it.

Doesn’t give you any information about why he took your chair out of all the other chairs that around there.

Doesn’t acknowledge the fact that you might need your chair to get some work done today.

You wouldn’t stand for it. You’d make a stand.

You’d follow that guy back to his cubicle and you’d say “Why my chair?”

Okay, so now it’s Tuesday morning when you’re at the office,

and a meeting invitation pops up on your calendar.

And it’s from this women that you kind of know from down the hall

and the subject line references a project that you’ve heard a little bit about.

But there’s no agenda.

There’s no information about why you were invited to the meeting,

and yet you accept the meeting invitation.

And you go.

And when this highly unproductive session is over,

you go back to your desk and you stand at your desk

and you say “Boy I wish I had those 2 hours back...

like I wish I had my chair back."

Everyday, we allow our coworkers, who are otherwise very, very nice people

to steal from us.

And I’m talking about something far more valuable than office furniture.

I’m talking about time.

Your time.

In fact, I believe that we are in the middle of a global epidemic,

of a terrible new illness, known as MAS,

Mindless Accept Syndrome.

The primary symptom of Mindless Accept Syndrome is just accepting a meeting invitation the minute it pops up on your calendar.

It’s an involuntary reflex, ding, click, bing, it’s in your calendar. “Gotta go, I’m already late for a meeting”

Meetings are important, right?

And collaboration is the key to success in any enterprise

and a well-run meeting can yield really actionable positive results.

But between globalization, and pervasive information technology,

the way that we work is really changed dramatically over the last few years.

And we’re miserable.

And we’re miserable not because the other guy can’t run a good meeting,

it’s because of MAS,

our mindless accept syndrome, which is a self-inflicted wound.

Actually I have evidence to prove that MAS is a global epidemic.

Let me tell you why.

A couple years ago, I put a video on YouTube,

and in the video, I acted out every terrible conference call that you’ve ever been on.

It goes on for about 5 minutes and it has all the things we hate about bad meetings.

There’s, uhm, there’s the moderator that has no idea how to run the meeting.

There are the participant who have no idea why they’re there.

The whole thing kind of collapses into this collaborative train wreck,

and uh, everyone leaves really angry.

It’s kind of funny.

Let’s take a quick look, just a little .. “Our goal today is to come to an agreement on a very important proposal

and as a group, we need to decide of –bloop bloop-

Hi, who just joined?”

“Hi it’s Joe! I’m working from home today!”

“Hi Joe, thanks for joining, great, I was just saying, we have a lot of people on the call that we’d like to get through,

So we’ll skip the role call and dive right in.

Our goal today is to make an agreement on a very important proposal.

As a group, we need to decide if –bloop bloop-

Hi, who just joined?

No? I thought I heard a beep.”

Sound familiar? Yes, sounds familiar to me too.

Couple of weeks after I put that online, five hundred thousand people in dozens of countries,

I mean dozens of countries watched this video.

And three years later, it’s still getting thousands of views every month.

It’s close to about a million right now.

In fact, some of the biggest companies in the world, companies that you’ve heard of but I won’t name,

uh, have asked for my permission to use this video in their new hire-training

To teach their new employees how not to run a meeting at their company.

And if the numbers there, million views and it’s being used by all these companies isn’t enough proof that we have a global problem with meetings,

there are the many, many thousands of comments posted online after the video went up.

Thousands of people wrote things like “OMG that was my day today”,

“That was my day everyday”,

“This is my life!”

One guy wrote, “It’s funny because it’s true.

Eerily, sadly, depressingly true.

It made me laugh until I cried,

and I cried, and I cried some more.”

This poor guy said “My daily life until retirement or death.

Sigh.”

These are real quotes and it’s real sad.

Common theme running through all of these comments online

is this fundamental belief that we are powerless to do anything other than go to meetings

and suffer through these poorly run meetings, and live to meet another day.

The truth is we’re not powerless at all.

In fact, the cure for MAS is right here in our hands, it’s right here in our fingertips, literally.

Something that I call “No MAS,”

which is something if I remember my high school’s Spanish means something like “Enough already make it stop!”

Here’s how NO MAS works, it’s very simple okay?

First of all, the next time you get a meeting invitation that doesn’t have a lot of information in it at all,

click the tentative button!

It’s okay, you’re allowed, it’s why it’s there, it’s right next to the accept button,

or the maybe button or whatever button is there for you not to accept immediately.

Then, get in touch with the person who ask you to, uh, to the meeting,

Tell them you’re very excited to support their work,

uh, ask them what the goal of the meeting is.

Tell them, you know, you’re interested in learning how you can help them achieve their goal.

And if we do this often enough, and we do it respectfully,

people might start to be a little more thoughtful about the way they put together meeting invitations.

And you can make more thoughtful decisions about accepting it.

People might actually start sending out agendas. Imagine!

Or they might not have a conference call with 12 people talking about a status

when, uh, they could just do a quick email and get it done with.

People just might start to change their behaviour

because you changed yours.

And they just might bring your chair back too!

No MAS!