Sometimes, analyzing a clever quote tells you what’s wrong with the idea it’s supposed to convince you of.

Want an example? H. Ross Perot, in whose company I once worked, said, “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.”

Clever, isn’t it? Persuasive regarding having a bias toward action, right?

Only … a lotta snakes eat a lotta vermin. Want less vermin? Cultivate environments that attract snakes.

Which isn’t to take anything away from Mr. Perot. He was a man of impeccable integrity, intense loyalty to his employees, and was possibly the best salesman in the history of the world.

And he had a fondness for catchy phrases, but not this one, from Voltaire: “A witty saying proves nothing.”

None of which has all that much to do with this week’s topic – the unfair reputation associated with the habitat in which committees live and breathe – the dreaded meeting.

Do some googling and you’ll find any number of write-ups that excoriate meetings as utter wastes of time and energy. You’ll also find screeds that explain how to make meetings more effective.

Rarest (excuse me while I pat myself on the back) are epistles that present a balanced view of when meetings are necessary and important vs when they’re wastes of time and energy.

When it comes to meetings, two problems emerge from the detritus. The first is that many meetings are poorly organized and facilitated. Attend enough poorly organized and facilitated meetings and you’ll be forgiven for failing to recognize that this is just another instance of Sturgeon’s Law: If 90% of everything is crap, 90% of meetings will be likewise, concluding that all meetings are wastes of time and energy and not that all badly run meetings are wastes of time and energy.

But then there’s the second problem: In many cases, a meeting is simply the wrong tool for the job, akin to using a driver to get out of a sand trap.

When the situation doesn’t call for a meeting, running the meeting more effectively just isn’t going to help anyone accomplish anything useful.

When do you need a meeting? Briefly, you need one when:

You need a group of people to reach a consensus – not a faux consensus but a real one, when everyone might not agree with a course of action but they all agree to it. Organizational dynamics being what they are, consensus by email chain simply isn’t reliable.

Often, though, the attempt to reach consensus is nothing more than an unwillingness to own a decision.

The unnecessary meeting is a symptom of organizational dysfunction, not a cause.

You’re running a project – not for the project’s day-to-day work, although there are times when different people each have a piece to a project puzzle but nobody has all of the pieces, so they need to meet to … well … puzzle it out.

But a necessity in all projects is the (usually weekly) project status meeting, in which each project team member reports their status to the team as a whole – whether the tasks that were supposed to start actually start, and those that were supposed to finish in fact finish.

These need to be meetings because the point isn’t to understand the project’s status. It’s to apply peer pressure to underperforming team members.

Bob’s last word: These are the guidelines for calling a meeting. Businesses that adhere to them will generally waste less time in pointless energy sinks than businesses that don’t.

But it doesn’t help you when you’re on the receiving end of the invitation.

What can? Recognize that in most cases you were invited as a courtesy. The convener figured the meeting is about a topic you have a stake in, and so you should have the opportunity to know what’s going on.

Getting out of these courtesy meetings is surprisingly easy. Just email the convener and ask, “Am I necessary for this meeting?”

More often than not the convener will happily email you the meeting’s presentation PowerPoint and breathe a sigh of relief.

Now appearing in CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “Brilliance: The CIO’s most seductive career-limiting trait.” You probably know this already, but it’s worth the reminder that for the most part, any executive isn’t supposed to have all the great ideas. Executives, and that includes the CIO, are supposed to be information brokers, finding and promoting the ideas that matter most.

Way back when, personal computers were just gadgets enjoyed by hobbyists.

Then, in 1979, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented VisiCalc, the world’s first electronic spreadsheet.

VisiCalc was, for the personal computer, what the inflation that followed the Big Bang was for the universe.

Then the Internet happened, and with it the four key innovations that made it interesting enough to stimulate all the other innovations that made it more interesting: Wikipedia, search engines, Google Maps, and Amazon.

Wikipedia is on the list because it changed where we all go to satisfy our curiosity about just about anything with confidence we aren’t just reading FAKE NEWS!

Search engines? Because they’re what we use when we want to find something someone wants us to find.

Google Maps wasn’t the first mapping application, but it’s completely replaced paper maps and the Yellow Pages for locating anything and navigating to it.

And Amazon is what we use when we want to buy something, never mind if the vendor is nearby or not. It’s also supplanted local libraries, and in part is supplanting the Library of Congress. It’s also what we use when we want to find a book about something.

Not to trivialize everything else on the internet … many readers would, for example, add blogs and social media … but it’s these innovations that resulted in the internet supplanting much of physical reality.

Then there’s one more innovation that, in its own way, has been just as influential: cybercrime. It’s key impact: Preventing innovation. This week’s topic: How to encourage innovation without endangering the enterprise.

Start here: “Innovation” isn’t a thing. Or more precisely, it isn’t just one thing. Conversations about innovation are easily derailed by confusing and conflating innovation’s various contexts.

Product innovation

Conversations about innovation are, for most people most of the time, about products and services. Product-innovative companies design, engineer, market, and sell products and services that have unexpected and exciting features.

Not that there’s anything wrong with adding unexpected and exciting features to your business’s products and services. Far from it: When it comes to marketplace success, product innovation is right up there with selling at the lowest price and making the whole buying experience more convenient.

Only in this day and age, many potentially valuable features might never see the light of day due to cybersecurity considerations.

Or, even worse, they might see the light of day while ignoring their cybersecurity implications.

Process innovation

When the subject is innovation and it isn’t about products and services, it’s probably about internal processes. And when it comes to competitive advantage, that’s as it should be: Better internal processes can result in lower product prices and improvements in convenience.

Big process improvements tend to come from formal projects that build cybersecurity into their deliverables. But as a general rule, there’s as much opportunity from large numbers of small improvements as from small numbers of big improvements.

If it weren’t for cybersecurity worries, business users could, between Excel and Robotic Process Automation tools, sand off a lot of small obstacles to process efficiency with minimal IT involvement.

But taking cybersecurity concerns into account, a lot of these opportunities will never see the light of day.

Products and processes are the most obvious types of innovation that can be stifled by cybersecurity considerations. But they aren’t the only ones.

But wait! There’s more!

Two types of innovation get less attention than they deserve: capability innovation and customer innovation.

Capability innovation is making the business competent at skills it could use to improve its products, services, and internal processes if only it knew how to do something.

Customer innovation is all about finding ways to attract customer segments the company currently ignores.

Both of these innovation categories are just as prone to being stifled by cybersecurity concerns as products and processes.

Bob’s last word: I’d love to tell you I have a brilliant solution that results in a highly innovative business that’s also perfectly hardened.

I don’t. My best suggestion (no, not “best practice”!) is an all-out, no-hold’s-barred, high-visibility effort to build cybersecurity awareness into the business culture. Couple that with turning the Cybersecurity organization into a highly accessible internal consulting group, ready, willing, and able to help anyone developing an innovation to harden their innovation.

If you have other alternatives to suggest, please post them in the comments. That’s what they’re for.

Bob’s sales pitch: It isn’t really a sales pitch, but it’s time for the annual KJR census. It’s your opportunity to let me know enough subscribers have enough interest in what I write every week to warrant the time and effort needed to write it.

It’s also your opportunity to let me know which of the topics I tend to write about … and others that I don’t … are topics you want to read about.

If you’re willing, please use the Comments so we can get a discussion going on the topics front. If you don’t want your thoughts to appear in a public forum, use the Contact form instead. Thanks!