Humour

The Law of Chai Service

T A Balasubramanian writes why chai has become an integral part of corporate meetings

Meetings are probably the corporate equivalent of the shavasana, or the corpse pose in yoga, which is considered to be the most relaxed state of mindless being, where your body feels completely formless and you descend gently into a deep coma. Or almost.

You must be familiar with the feeling. Your mind turns to oozing mud if you have to attend regularly, as part of your role as CIO, the many long and unproductive meetings that companies set up, mainly to ensure that everyone is present on the location, at least in body, and secondly, to increase the revenue of the tea industry.

Tea, or chai, is to meetings what electricity is to a bulb. It produces wakefulness when your mind has almost shut down and your body is about to drop off into deep slumber. Not a very wise thing to do when you, Papyrus Bytewala, the cool and collected Chief Information Officer, are sitting around the same giant round table facing Fin Fina, the merciless Chief of Finance. Others in no particular order would be: Gulabi Manpowa, the soft-spoken Head of Human Resources, and Brando Bhatt, the firebrand Marketing Head. Hence, you need the restorative power of chai.

Meetings you have to attend not because meetings are held with you in mind, but because your absence will be a matter of grave discussion in the next meeting, taking up the entire session in all probability.

Since you are part of a large corporation, you have learned to navigate through and accept the phenomenon of chai-served and chai-recharged meetings.

This is another meeting, but the story behind it has a familiar ring to it. It sounds like millions of other meetings. You are part of a steering committee that has been set up to investigate means to speed up paper movement between departments. The problem began when Gulabi complained that she was not receiving circulars that were promptly reaching other heads on the day of issue. Brando came up with the

suggestion that hard copies of circulars could be eliminated if only the memos could be turned into electronic format and zapped instantly across the intranet to every recipient’s desktop. Fin Fina wanted to know how it would impact productivity and the cost implications. These were the originators of the steering committee, which, including you, and two more staffers loyal to Fin Fina, made up a grand total of six. This gang took on what is now known in meeting mythology as the Memo Zap project.

And you, Papyrus, the man responsible for making it happen, you the CIO in the hot seat, are now to deliberate with this gathering, including details of costs and productivity implications. Since everybody thinks memos are the equivalent of red blood corpuscles in the circulatory system of your company, providing much-needed oxygen to the remotest corners, your neck is now in a vulnerable spot.

In the usual style of meeting massacre, your carefully proposed ideas will be ripped apart only into 50 shreds, and everyone will decide that the solution does not seem to be good enough. There is going to be a lot of flak. Memos induce religious frenzy in organisations. Old world people like Gulabi would still enjoy having hard copy on their in-trays instead of blips on their screen. Fin Fina would like to have both hard and soft copies. Brando would like to have multiple hard and soft copies on different PCs, just in case there is a disk crash and the paper copies get recycled before being read. And so on.

Sounds familiar? In order not to go totally crazy while having to endure all of these corporate conference-room experiences with specially set up steering committees, you can use what I have formulated as the Law of Chai Service. In brief, this empirical law will help you become the most accomplished meeting survivor, hopefully with your mind intact.

Here goes the formulation: The length of time of a meeting in hours is directly proportional to the square of the number of attendees, plus the time spent exclusively sipping chai. The two factors are separate since you can either talk or sip chai, but cannot do both at once.

Or, to use mathematical symbolism, H = k*P squared + C, where H equals time in hours, k is a constant that varies with the culture of the company, P equals the number of people in the meeting, and C is the time spent in drinking chai. In large government-run organisations, C tends to be an astronomical figure, usually more than k*P squared.

This Law of Chai Service is easy to use and is intuitive. It is vital to note the square factor. Since six squared is 36 and two squared is four, a meeting with six people (as in the Memo Zap gang) in a room takes nine times as long as a meeting between two people. That is, a 10-minute chat between two people takes 1.5 hours when there are six people in the meeting.

The Memo Zap project would be your beta test case. To check out the law, you could ask Fin Fina to send out those two spare staff members on an errand, especially since they seem to do nothing on the steering

committee except raise objections about the absence of estimates and cost implications and guzzle chai by the kilolitre. Then, with just four members, calculate the difference in time. Next, try eliminating Gulabi, and do the maths. Finally, eliminate Fin Fina himself and recalculate. You get the idea. Be prepared for amazing discoveries.

The implications of this seemingly innocent law are staggering. It explains, for example, why a government with 300-plus members in an assembly is far less able to govern effectively compared to the days when there were only 100-odd members. Remember that there is increased consumption of tea, and the time taken to serve tea to 300 instead of 100 is far more.

Further research, I am sure, will show how this law offers a crucial explanation of why small start-up companies can take leadership positions, seemingly out of nowhere, in markets being attacked simultaneously by huge corporations with massive committees serviced by tanks of chai.

One of the natural extensions of the law could be: “The length of time worth staying at a meeting is inversely proportional to the square of the number of attendees. Provided no chai is being served, or the chai is of exceptionally bad quality.”

The profound thing about this extension is that it implies that a meeting which has no attendees is of infinite value. Not to mention the acceptable loss to the tea industry, which Fin Fina will heartily endorse.