Five minutes in, ninety minutes gone.

I took a job at a corporation once. Deputy director for one region of a national distribution network, forty-odd branches, a few hundred sales points. I lasted a year, and I've called it the biggest mistake of my working life ever since. This is the morning that told me why, and I didn't need until lunchtime to understand it.

I sat down, opened the calendar, and ninety minutes of my week were already spoken for. Three invitations had landed while I was still finding out where the coffee lived.

The first was with the accounting team. The second was with the managers who ran the sales points. The third was at head office, in another city, for every regional director and deputy in the country.

Three separate rooms. Three separate audiences. One subject.

Head office had decided to add a step to the stock accounting. One step. Not a new business line, not a merger, not a system migration. A single additional entry in the way goods moved from the warehouse to the shelf.

And to introduce that one step, somebody had built a rollout: brief the accountants, brief the people on the ground, then gather the whole management layer of a national company in one building to talk about how the rollout was going.

Nobody had scheduled a meeting to ask whether the step was worth taking. That question wasn't on anybody's calendar.

I read the three invitations twice. Then I picked up the phone and called the general director.

I won't reproduce what I said. I told him I wasn't spending my time or my people's time on something a man had thought up in the bathroom that morning, and I declined all three. Not diplomatically. My region held none of those meetings.

Now, before you take that as advice: I could do it because I was untouchable, and I knew it. They had hired me off a written assessment with more than four hundred questions, and my score came in at nearly double the next candidate's. I was insubordinate on a level that would have got anyone else escorted out, and they kept me anyway, because I was the one they called when something was genuinely on fire. That's not a strategy. That's a position, and most people don't have it.

So don't copy the phone call. The part that matters happened without me anyway.

The other forty-odd branches held all three meetings. Every accountant, every sales-point manager, every regional director. Then the whole management layer travelled to head office and spent a day on it.

And at the end of all that, the company reached its conclusion.

The new step doubled the work. The accountants were recording something the sales-point managers were already recording. Same information, entered twice, by two sets of people who never saw each other's screens. Everyone had been asked to spend an hour a week producing a second copy of a number that already existed.

The fix, when it finally came, took no meetings at all. Somebody put it into the accounting software. From then on the entry was generated once, automatically, from the delivery notes that were already being issued for every sales point. No extra work for anyone. The delivery notes had been sitting there the whole time.

A hundred and twenty meetings and a national gathering, to arrive at: don't do this.

Here's the part that still bothers me, and it has nothing to do with me being right.

That company ran a controlled experiment by accident. Forty branches got the full treatment. One branch got none of it. If the meetings were doing something, my region should have fallen behind. Wrong entries, confused staff, a mess in the ledgers.

None of that happened. My region carried on and closed the month like every other month.

Nobody looked. Not one person in that building compared the branch that skipped everything with the forty that didn't. The result was sitting in their own reporting, free, already paid for, and it went unread because nobody was asking that question. They were asking how the rollout was going, which is a different question, and a much more comfortable one.

Your company is running the same experiment right now. Somewhere in it there's a team that quietly skipped the process, or a branch that never got the memo, and they're doing fine. That's your data. It costs nothing to look at, and looking at it is the only thing standing between you and the next hundred and twenty meetings.

If it happened to me today, I'd do it differently. Not because I've mellowed, but because the phone call only worked for me, and I'd want something that works for the person who has to keep their job.

I'd send one recording. Fifteen minutes, screen visible, showing exactly what the new step is and what it changes. Anyone who needs it watches it when they have a gap, at their own speed, twice if they want. Then one meeting for the people who still have questions after watching, which is usually a much smaller room than the one you were about to book.

And there's a second thing a recording does that a meeting never has. Six weeks later, when somebody asks what was actually decided, you have the answer. The room version of that decision left with the people who were in it, and it left slightly different in each of their heads.

An hour of your team's time isn't free, and it isn't small. Put a number on the room before you book it: the people in it, their real cost per hour, multiplied by however long you're about to hold them. Then ask whether the thing you're rolling out is worth that number.

At my old company, nobody ran that multiplication. If somebody had, the answer would have arrived on the first morning instead of after a hundred and twenty meetings.

The most expensive way ever invented to avoid doing the work is a meeting about doing the work.