Anyone who has ever endured LinkedIn, “the world’s largest professional network”, with its mindless spam, incomprehensible messages about “work anniversaries”, endorsements for “skills” you don’t possess, and notifications about jobs you’ve never had, probably won’t be surprised to learn that Reid Hoffman, the co-founder, has a bizarre approach to business meals.
How bizarre? Well, it was revealed in a New Yorker profile the other day that the man who has done for business networking what DFS has done for furniture sales, and what Nigeria has done for unsolicited email, “tries to begin all meals with a ritual in which both parties write down a list of the topics they want to discuss”.
Which, at first, sounded to me like a cross between the business meal equivalent of BBC’s Question Time and the second-worst dinner party I’ve ever attended, which involved the host prescribing the topic of conversation for guests, standing up to change it every 30 minutes.
Though something happened as I reread the description of one of Mr Hoffman’s business dinners with a contact where he arrives wearing two watches (“one on each wrist — an Apple Watch and a competing product — so he could see which one he liked better”), bustles in “a few minutes late”, sits down, pulls out “a small notebook filled with an indecipherable scrawl”, shrugs, ticks off some items on his list (“an upper-level undergraduate computer-science class he’s teaching at Stanford called Technology-Enabled Blitzscaling”; his recent meetings with George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom, and Ban Ki Moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations . . .) and embarks on a meal that apparently gains “altitude and velocity” as it proceeds. I softened.
At least, there is no shortage of evidence out there that suggests Mr Hoffman may not be alone in having no idea how to navigate business meals. According to a recent survey of 2,000 people, conducted by Bookatable.co.uk, about half of Britons have never tried sushi, oysters or quinoa, 31 per cent have never had lobster and 12 per cent have never had an olive. Which must make the average business meal in London a challenge for a great many people.
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Then there is all the official advice dished out by business etiquette experts on the subject, which suggests that not knowing how to eat an olive is the least of many people’s problems. I mean, newspapers and business websites wouldn’t be publishing advice instructing business diners to avoid “dicing your meal into bite-sized pieces all at once”, “making a sandwich of your dinner rolls”, “asking to finish anyone else’s food”, “licking your utensils or fingers”, “using toothpicks”, “pushing away or stacking your dishes”, “tucking your napkin into your collar”, “tipping your chair back” and “asking for a to-go box” unless people were actually doing this stuff. Not least, there is my own difficult experience of business lunches, which is easy to analyse because many have been written up in print, in the form of newspaper interviews. They included a lunch at Locanda Locatelli with the Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, who ordered penne without even glancing at the menu because “this is what I normally have at every Italian restaurant — I am quite controlled, I don’t know the other dishes, they all have very complicated names. I get very confused.”
I had lunch with the self-aggrandising entrepreneur Reuben Singh, who opted for pesto tagliatelle as a starter, then, in an odd display of childishness, asked the waiter for tomato ketchup as an accompaniment to both the starter and the main course of vegetable risotto. Then there was a hotel tea with the Irish musician Enya, where I realised to my mortification that I’d scoffed eight finger sandwiches while she had barely pecked at the food.
I used to think I found business meals a chore because, as the child of Indian immigrants, I grew up eating with my hands, and my parents purchased western cutlery only after I got told off at school by a dinner lady for scooping up mash with a spoon, and I didn’t have my first restaurant meal until my teens. But perhaps there is something intrinsic to business meals that makes them difficult to navigate for everyone. Think of all the things that can go wrong with a meal, from not knowing how to eat the food, to spilling wine, to throwing up.
Then think of all the things that are challenging about restaurants, from remembering which cutlery to use when, to the etiquette of how to tip waiters, to the annoyance of nearby diners. Then think of all the challenges of the average meeting, from it running too long, to the distraction of buzzing phones, to people taking credit for one another’s ideas and talking over one another. Put them all together and you’ve basically got a recipe for disaster.
More fundamentally, it seems to me that the mission of any restaurant meal (to eat, relax and enjoy food with people you like) is fundamentally opposed to the mission of any business meeting (to exchange information as quickly as possible with people you don’t necessarily have any personal affection for, and depart). Which may be why I cannot remember enjoying the food at any meal taken for work. Just as golf is a good walk spoilt, a business lunch or dinner is a nice meal destroyed, or a meeting slowed down by unnecessary consumption.
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Frankly, if God thought that business meals were a good idea, he wouldn’t have invented Starbucks. Though perhaps Mr Hoffman is ahead of the curve on this front. I’ve just reread the New Yorker piece and noticed a line that states that, for him, business meals are “not about the food and drink”.
Apparently, “he is on a perpetual diet and seems barely to notice what is put before him”. So maybe he has not reinvented the business meal at all, but just learnt how to have meetings like the rest of us.
Sathnam Sanghera is a journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter @Sathnam