In the wake of Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris climate agreement, there’s been increased controversy over CEO participation in the president’s business council.
Several key members have decided not to participate in the council because of the decision to back out of the agreement, but what exactly does the council do to begin with?
John Kenneth Galbraith, who wrote about Herbert Hoover’s meetings with top business leaders in the wake of the stock market crash in his book “The Great Crash of 1929” made an interesting point about meetings that are called without a real purpose …
“Yet to suppose that President Hoover was engaged only in organizing further reassurance is to do him a serious injustice. He was also conducting one of the oldest, most important — and, unhappily, one of the least understood — rites in American life. This is the rite of the meeting which is called not to do business but to do no business. It is a rite which is still much practiced in our time. It is worth examining for a moment.
Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business.
Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done.
Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.”
In other words, doing nothing can be considered an action plan. Now don’t we all feel better?
