Learn to Become a Digital Marketing Analyst with Unilever’s New Certificate Program

Unilever, the con­sumer goods com­pa­ny head­quar­tered in Lon­don, owns over 400 brands. Dove, Lip­ton, Ben & Jer­ry’s, Hell­man­n’s and Knorr–you know and use many of Unilever’s prod­ucts. The same goes for many peo­ple liv­ing across the globe. An esti­mat­ed 3.4 bil­lion peo­ple use Unilever prod­ucts every day. How has Unilever estab­lished such vast reach? Through mar­ket­ing. Like oth­er con­sumer prod­ucts com­pa­nies, Unilever depends on mar­ket­ing to build brand aware­ness for each prod­uct and to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them from com­peti­tors. Mar­ket­ing is part of the lifeblood of the orga­ni­za­tion, and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly allows the com­pa­ny to thrive here in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Hap­pi­ly, for any aspir­ing mar­keters out there, Unilever has just launched a new Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Ana­lyst cer­tifi­cate pro­gram. Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the pro­gram con­sists of four cours­es (each tak­ing an esti­mat­ed 20 hours to com­plete) that focus on help­ing stu­dents build job-ready skills in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics. The cours­es include:

  • Cus­tomer Under­stand­ing and Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels
  • Mea­sure­ment and Analy­sis
  • Cam­paign Per­for­mance Report­ing, Visu­al­iza­tion, & Improve­ment
  • Advanced Tools for Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Ana­lyt­ics

As stu­dents move through the pro­gram, they will “learn in-demand skills like data analy­sis, cus­tomer seg­men­ta­tion, and SEO opti­miza­tion.” They will also start “col­lect­ing and inter­pret­ing data to eval­u­ate the per­for­mance of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing efforts, improve strate­gies, and con­tribute to achiev­ing mar­ket­ing goals and objec­tives.”

Stu­dents can audit each course for free, or sign up to earn a share­able cer­tifi­cate. Stu­dents who select the lat­ter option will be charged $49 per month. So, if you spend 10 hours per week, you can com­plete the 80-hour cer­tifi­cate pro­gram in two months, and pay about $100 in total.

Sign up for the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Ana­lyst cer­tifi­cate pro­gram here.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Gen­er­a­tive AI for Every­one: A Free Course from AI Pio­neer Andrew Ng

Google Unveils a Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑Commerce Cer­tifi­cate: 7 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months

Google & Cours­era Cre­ate a Career Cer­tifi­cate That Pre­pares Stu­dents for Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty Jobs in 6 Months

Jimmy Buffett (RIP) Performs His New Song “Margaritaville,” Live in 1978: The Birth of a Song That Later Became a Business Empire

Jim­my Buf­fett wrote “Mar­gar­i­taville” in 1977.  It end­ed up being his only song to reach the pop Top 10. But the song car­ried him for the next 45 years. When you think Mar­gar­i­taville, you think of an easy-breezy way of life. And that sim­ple idea infused the brand of Buf­fet­t’s Mar­gar­i­taville busi­ness empire. Between the song’s birth and the singer’s death this week­end, Buf­fett cre­at­ed a Mar­gar­i­taville busi­ness empire that includ­ed bars, restau­rants, casi­nos, beach resorts, retire­ment com­mu­ni­ties, cruis­es, pack­aged foods, appar­el, footwear, and beyond. This spring, Buf­fett improb­a­bly made Forbes’ list of bil­lion­aires. Above, you can watch a young Jim­my Buf­fet per­form “Mar­gar­i­taville” in 1978, right at the begin­ning of the song’s long jour­ney from hit, to brand, to com­mer­cial empire.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

 

How Streaming Led to the TV Writers Strike: Four TV Writers Explain the Logic of the Strike

Though it’s too ear­ly to know what will turn out to be the defin­ing cul­tur­al expe­ri­ence of the twen­ty-twen­ties, I’d put my mon­ey on first hear­ing of an acclaimed tele­vi­sion show from one of its devot­ed fans only after it’s already been on the air for months or even years, if not after its lament­ed can­cel­la­tion. Part of this has to do with a change in quan­ti­ty, laid out by tele­vi­sion writer War­ren Leight in the Vox video above: “There used to be 80 shows in a year. Now you’re up to 500, 550 shows in a year,” many of them cre­at­ed not for tra­di­tion­al broad­cast net­works but for new­er, con­tent-hun­gri­er online stream­ing plat­forms. “For writ­ers, it was good because it gave peo­ple entry.”

Writ­ing for stream­ing, Leight explains, “you did­n’t have to wor­ry about com­mer­cial breaks” and their dra­mat­ic dis­rup­tions. Instead, “you get to write a dif­fer­ent struc­ture. Maybe it’s just an organ­ic three-act struc­ture to an hour.” And in short­er stream­ing sea­sons, “you could arc a sto­ry across eight episodes. You can go a lit­tle dark­er, you can go a lit­tle deep­er.”

But “as the episode orders have shrunk,” says Leight’s col­league Julia Yorks, “what used to be 40 weeks of the year that you were work­ing is now 20 weeks,” with an at-least-con­comi­tant reduc­tion in pay­checks. What­ev­er its artis­tic short­com­ings, the old “net­work mod­el” guar­an­teed a cer­tain degree of sta­bil­i­ty for those who wrote its shows — a sta­bil­i­ty dis­rupt­ed by the age of stream­ing.

Hence the ongo­ing Writ­ers Guild of Amer­i­ca strike, and the cen­tral­i­ty to the WGA’s demands of improved resid­u­als (that is, pay­ments made for a pro­duc­tion after its ini­tial run) from stream­ing media. But the pro­fes­sion­als inter­viewed for this video also express con­cerns about what hap­pens to the shows them­selves when their writ­ing gets sep­a­rat­ed from their pro­duc­tion, which has become increas­ing­ly com­mon in recent years. On the likes of Law and Order or Friends, says Yorks, “your show was being filmed con­cur­rent­ly when you were in the writ­ers’ room,” cre­at­ing nat­ur­al oppor­tu­ni­ties for con­tin­u­ous cross-dis­ci­pli­nary inter­ac­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion. We may live in a “gold­en age of tele­vi­sion,” but left unchecked, the strain of this frag­men­ta­tion, as well as the finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties imposed on writ­ers, could very well take the shine off of it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Har­lan Ellison’s Won­der­ful Rant on Why Writ­ers Should Always Get Paid

Ray­mond Chan­dler: There’s No Art of the Screen­play in Hol­ly­wood

How Break­ing Bad Craft­ed the Per­fect TV Pilot: A Video Essay

10 Tips From Bil­ly Wilder on How to Write a Good Screen­play

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Google & Coursera Launch New Career Certificates That Prepare Students for Jobs in 2–6 Months: Business Intelligence & Advanced Data Analytics

Back in 2021, Google launched a series of online cours­es designed to help stu­dents earn a pro­fes­sion­al cer­tifi­cate in six months and also land an entry-lev­el job. In its orig­i­nal offer­ing, Google devel­oped cer­tifi­cate pro­grams in five pro­fes­sion­al areas: User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment, IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion. Now, the tech com­pa­ny has added two new pro­grams to its line­up, each offered through Cours­er­a’s online edu­ca­tion plat­form.

First, the Google Advanced Data Ana­lyt­ics Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate builds on the orig­i­nal Data Ana­lyt­ics Cer­tifi­cate and “delves into machine learn­ing, pre­dic­tive mod­el­ing, and exper­i­men­tal design to col­lect and ana­lyze large amounts of data.” Fea­tur­ing sev­en cours­es in total, the pro­gram takes rough­ly six months to com­plete and aims to teach stu­dents how to 1) build regres­sion and machine learn­ing mod­els to ana­lyze and inter­pret data, 2) cre­ate data visu­al­iza­tions and apply sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods to inves­ti­gate data, and 3) com­mu­ni­cate insights from data analy­sis to stake­hold­ers. Essen­tial­ly, it teach­es many tools of the trade need­ed to become a senior data ana­lyst or junior data sci­en­tist.

With the Google Busi­ness Intel­li­gence Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate, stu­dents can par­tic­i­pate in a short­er pro­gram that focus­es on trans­form­ing data into action­able insights for orga­ni­za­tions. Con­sist­ing of three cours­es (and last­ing about two months), the pro­gram helps stu­dents learn skills like data mod­el­ing, data visu­al­iza­tion, and dashboarding–skills that have wide applic­a­bil­i­ty in our data-dri­ven age.

Stu­dents can actu­al­ly take indi­vid­ual cours­es in these pro­fes­sion­al cer­tifi­cate pro­grams for free. How­ev­er, if you would like to receive the cer­tifi­cates, Cours­era charges $49 per month (after an ini­tial 7‑day free tri­al peri­od). That means that the Advanced Data Ana­lyt­ics Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate, if com­plet­ed in 6 months, will cost less than $300. And the Busi­ness Intel­li­gence Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate would run about $100. Once stu­dents com­plete a cer­tifi­cate, they can add the cre­den­tial to their LinkedIn pro­file, resume, or CV. Like­wise, they can con­nect with 150+ U.S. hir­ing orga­ni­za­tions in Google’s Employ­er Con­sor­tium. If you would like to learn more about Google Career Cer­tifi­cates, you can read this handy page on Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas’ web­site.

Update: Google has also added a new cer­tifi­cate pro­gram focused on Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty. Find out more about the pro­gram here.

You can sign up for the pro­grams by click­ing on the links in bold above. Each pro­gram has a 7‑day free tri­al.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Dying from Overwork: Disturbing Looks Inside Japan’s Karoshi and China’s “996” Work System

By most mea­sures, Japan boasts the high­est life expectan­cy in the world. But that rank­ing, of course, does­n’t mean that every Japan­ese per­son sees old age. Though the coun­try’s rate of vio­lent crime is low enough to be the envy of most of the world, its sui­cide rate isn’t, and it says even more that the Japan­ese lan­guage has a word that refers specif­i­cal­ly to death by over­work. I first encoun­tered it near­ly thir­ty years ago in Dil­bert com­ic strip. “In Japan, employ­ees occa­sion­al­ly work them­selves to death. It’s called karōshi,” says Dil­bert’s pointy-haired boss. “I don’t want that to hap­pen to any­body in my depart­ment. The trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead rel­a­tives beck­on.”

You can see the phe­nom­e­non of karōshi exam­ined more seri­ous­ly in the short Now­ness video at the top of the post. In it, a series of Japan­ese salary­men (a Japan­ese Eng­lish term now well-known around the world) speak to the exhaust­ing and unceas­ing rig­ors of their every­day work sched­ules — and, in some cas­es, to the empti­ness of the homes that await them each night.

The CNBC seg­ment just above inves­ti­gates what can be done about such labor con­di­tions, which even in white-col­lar work­places con­tribute to the heart attacks, strokes, and oth­er imme­di­ate caus­es of deaths ulti­mate­ly ascribed to karōshi. In a grim irony, Japan has the low­est pro­duc­tiv­i­ty among the G7 nations: its peo­ple work hard, yet their com­pa­nies are hard­ly work­ing.

Ini­tia­tives to put a stop to the ill effects of over­work, up to and includ­ing karōshi, include manda­to­ry vaca­tion days and office lights that switch off auto­mat­i­cal­ly at 10:00 p.m. Among the lat­est is “Pre­mi­um Fri­day,” a pro­gram explained in the Vice video above. Devel­oped by Kei­dan­ren, Japan’s old­est busi­ness lob­by, it was ini­tial­ly received as “a direct response to karōshi,” but it has its ori­gins in mar­ket­ing. “We want­ed to cre­ate a nation­al event that bol­stered con­sump­tion,” says the direc­tor of Kei­dan­ren’s indus­tri­al pol­i­cy bureau. By that log­ic, it made good sense to let work­ers out ear­ly on Fri­days — let them out to shop. But Pre­mi­um Fri­day has yet to catch on in most Japan­ese enter­pris­es, aware as they are that Japan’s eco­nom­ic might no longer intim­i­dates the world.

The afore­men­tioned low pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, along with a rapid­ly aging and even con­tract­ing pop­u­la­tion, con­tributed to Japan’s loss of its posi­tion as the world’s sec­ond-largest econ­o­my. It was over­tak­en in 2011 by Chi­na, a coun­try with over­work prob­lems of its own. The Vice report above cov­ers the “996” sys­tem, which stands for work­ing from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m, six days a week. Preva­lent in Chi­nese tech com­pa­nies, it has been blamed for stress, ill­ness, and death among employ­ees. Laws lim­it­ing work­ing hours have thus far proven inef­fec­tive, or at least cir­cum­ventable. Cer­tain pun­dits nev­er stop insist­ing that the future is Chi­nese; if they’re right, all this ought to give pause to the work­ers of the world, East­ern and West­ern alike.

Relat­ed con­tent:

“Inemuri,” the Japan­ese Art of Tak­ing Pow­er Naps at Work, on the Sub­way, and Oth­er Pub­lic Places

Why 1999 Was the Year of Dystopi­an Office Movies: What The Matrix, Fight Club, Amer­i­can Beau­ty, Office Space & Being John Malkovich Shared in Com­mon

“Tsun­doku,” the Japan­ese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the Eng­lish Lan­guage

The Employ­ment: A Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion About Why We’re So Dis­en­chant­ed with Work Today

What is the Secret to Liv­ing a Long, Hap­py & Cre­ative­ly Ful­fill­ing Life?: Dis­cov­er the Japan­ese Con­cept of Iki­gai

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” Their first cer­tifi­cates focused on Project Man­age­ment, Data Ana­lyt­ics, User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion. Now comes their latest–a cer­tifi­cate ded­i­cat­ed to Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce.

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate con­sists of sev­en cours­es, all col­lec­tive­ly designed to help stu­dents “devel­op dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce strate­gies; attract and engage cus­tomers through dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chan­nels like search and email; mea­sure mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics and share insights; build e‑commerce stores, ana­lyze e‑commerce per­for­mance, and build cus­tomer loy­al­ty.” The cours­es include:

In total, this pro­gram “includes over 190 hours of instruc­tion and prac­tice-based assess­ments, which sim­u­late real-world dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce sce­nar­ios that are crit­i­cal for suc­cess in the work­place.” Along the way, stu­dents will learn how to use tools and plat­forms like Can­va, Con­stant Con­tact, Google Ads, Google Ana­lyt­ics, Hoot­suite, Hub­Spot, Mailchimp, Shopi­fy, and Twit­ter. You can start a 7‑day free tri­al and explore the cours­es. If you con­tin­ue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That trans­lates to about $235 after 6 months.

If you don’t want to pay, you can audit each course for free, with­out ulti­mate­ly receiv­ing the cer­tifi­cate.

Explore the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Become a Project Man­ag­er With­out a Col­lege Degree with Google’s Project Man­age­ment Cer­tifi­cate

Google Data Ana­lyt­ics Cer­tifi­cate: 8 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months

How Eating Kentucky Fried Chicken Became a Christmas Tradition in Japan

This time of year, the inter­net thrills to the fact that the Japan­ese eat Ken­tucky Fried Chick­en for Christ­mas. Those Japan­ese cus­tomers who want a pre­mi­um KFC din­ner with all the trim­mings ready by Christ­mas Eve should reserve it well in advance, much as they do with the elab­o­rate­ly dec­o­rat­ed kurisuma­su kee­ki that fol­lows it as dessert. Less well-under­stood are the ori­gins of this curi­ous mod­ern cus­tom. The Japan­ese them­selves, even those who reli­gious­ly tuck into a Colonel Sanders-brand­ed Christ­mas din­ner each year, are sub­ject to cer­tain mis­con­cep­tions. At least in my expe­ri­ence, every Japan­ese per­son has expressed sur­prise when told that KFC at Christ­mas­time is not an Amer­i­can tra­di­tion.

KFC’s mar­ket­ing in Japan has long exploit­ed an asso­ci­a­tion with Amer­i­can her­itage, implic­it­ly or indeed explic­it­ly.” Colonel Sanders is dis­cov­ered as a boy of sev­en bak­ing rye bread in the roomy kitchen of his ‘old Ken­tucky home,’ ” writes Japa­nol­o­gist John Nathan in his mem­oir Liv­ing Care­less­ly in Tokyo and Else­where, describ­ing a KFC tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial of the 1980s.

“ ‘A life­time lat­er,’ the nar­ra­tor intoned, ‘this same tra­di­tion of excel­lence was trans­ferred by the Colonel to his fried chick­en.’ The pre­pos­ter­ous sell­ing point was KFC as tra­di­tion­al, aris­to­crat­ic food from the Amer­i­can South. I couldn’t imag­ine a more amus­ing exam­ple of an Amer­i­can adver­tis­er play­ing to Japan’s nation­al obses­sion with Amer­i­can val­ues and man­ners.”

This com­mer­cial appears in The Colonel Comes to Japan, a 1981 half-hour doc­u­men­tary Nathan filmed for the WGBH busi­ness series Enter­prise. So does Loy West­on, the Amer­i­can exec­u­tive in charge of KFC’s Japan­ese oper­a­tions, who insists that the aris­toc­ra­cy angle offers no “con­sumer ben­e­fit.” But when informed by a Japan­ese exec­u­tive that the spot test­ed bet­ter than any they’d pro­duced before, he responds sim­ply: “I give up. This is Japan.” Four decades lat­er, West­ern­ers who want to suc­ceed doing busi­ness in the Land of the Ris­ing Sun must still share that atti­tude — espe­cial­ly when pre­sent­ed with strate­gies they lack the cul­tur­al ground­ing to com­pre­hend.

KFC’s pres­ence in Japan goes back to 1970, when its first store opened for the Osa­ka World Expo. Its man­ag­er Takeshi Okawara was the one to think of pro­mot­ing the chain’s “par­ty bar­rels” of chick­en as a fes­tive sub­sti­tute for an Amer­i­can-style turkey din­ner. The inspi­ra­tion, accord­ing to the Ched­dar Exam­ines video at the top of the post, was being asked by a local school to deliv­er chick­en to its Christ­mas par­ty dressed as San­ta Claus. (His will­ing­ness to do so no doubt played a part in his lat­er becom­ing Japan­ese KFC’s chief exec­u­tive.) With­in a few years “Ken­tucky Christ­mas” had become a house­hold phrase, and one still used in the more recent TV com­mer­cials com­piled just above.

In Japan, a coun­try where Chris­tians con­sti­tute just one or two per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, eat­ing KFC has become one of Christ­mas’ pri­ma­ry cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions. The Christ­mas song “Sutek­ina Hol­i­day” by Mariya Takeuchi — now world-famous as the singer of the revived-by-Youtube 1980s dance tune “Plas­tic Love” — is com­mon­ly known as “the Ken­tucky Christ­mas song.” With Christ­mas­time busi­ness account­ing for a star­tling ten per­cent of Japan­ese KFC’s sales in any giv­en year, mea­sures have been tak­en to ensure that the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic does­n’t put too much of a dent into it: the intro­duc­tion of some social dis­tanc­ing, for exam­ple, into its noto­ri­ous­ly long hol­i­day lines. Ken­tucky Christ­mas has proven a suc­cess year after year in Japan, but thus far it has­n’t been adopt­ed in oth­er Asian coun­tries. It cer­tain­ly has­n’t in Korea, where I live — but then again, we’ve got much bet­ter fried chick­en out here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hōshi: A Short Film on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japan­ese Fam­i­ly for 46 Gen­er­a­tions

In Japan­ese Schools, Lunch Is As Much About Learn­ing As It’s About Eat­ing

The Restau­rant of Mis­tak­en Orders: A Tokyo Restau­rant Where All the Servers Are Peo­ple Liv­ing with Demen­tia

Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burg­er King Whopper–While Wish­ing the Burg­er Came from McDonald’s (1981)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

John Cleese Presents His 5‑Step Plan for Shorter, More Productive Meetings (1976)

Let’s face it, meet­ings are bor­ing at best and at worst, chaot­ic, volatile, and poten­tial­ly vio­lent. And let’s also face it: to get through life as func­tion­ing adults, we’re going to have to sit through one or two of them — or even one or two of them a week.

Maybe we’re the one who calls the meet­ings, and maybe they all feel like a waste of time. One solu­tion is to have more infor­mal meet­ings. This can be espe­cial­ly tempt­ing in the age of work-from-home, when it’s impos­si­ble to know how many meet­ing atten­dees are wear­ing pants. Few­er rules can raise the spon­tane­ity quo­tient, but allow­ing for the unex­pect­ed can invite dis­as­ter as well as epiphany.

On the oth­er end of the scale, we have the for­mal­i­ty of par­lia­men­tary rules of order, such as those intro­duced by U.S. Army offi­cer Hen­ry Mar­tyn Robert in 1876. Robert, whose father was the first pres­i­dent of More­house Col­lege, gained a wealth of expe­ri­ence with unpro­duc­tive meet­ings as he trav­eled around the coun­try with the Army. One par­tic­u­lar meet­ing became a defin­ing expe­ri­ence, as one account has it:

While in San Fran­cis­co, the local leader of his com­mu­ni­ty didn’t show up for a church meet­ing. Hen­ry Robert was asked to pre­side over the town hall (with­out any pri­or notice). Let’s just say that on this par­tic­u­lar evening in 1876, he did a bad job. An hour into the meet­ing, peo­ple were scream­ing and the church actu­al­ly erupt­ed into open con­flict.

Sad­ly, this sort of thing has become almost rou­tine at town halls and school board meet­ings. But it needn’t be so at the office. Nor, says John Cleese in the brief video above, do meet­ings need to fol­low the for­mal­i­ty of par­lia­men­tary pro­ce­dure.

Cleese’s rules are sim­pler even than the sim­pli­fied Roberts or Rosen­berg’s Rules of Order, an even more sim­pli­fied ver­sion of Robert’s Rules. Fur­ther­more, Cleese avoids using words like “Rules” which can be a turn-off in our egal­i­tar­i­an times. Instead, he presents us with a “5‑Step Plan” for hold­ing bet­ter and short­er meet­ings.

1. Plan — Clear your mind about the pre­cise objec­tives of the meet­ing. Be clear why you need it and list the sub­jects.
2. Inform — Make sure every­one knows exact­ly what is being dis­cussed, why, and what you want from the dis­cus­sion. Antic­i­pate what infor­ma­tion and peo­ple may be need­ed and make sure they’re there.
3. Pre­pare — Pre­pare the log­i­cal sequence items. Pre­pare the time allo­ca­tion to each item on the basis of its impor­tance not its urgency.
4. Struc­ture and Con­trol — Take the evi­dence stage before the inter­pre­ta­tion stage and that before the action stage and stop peo­ple jump­ing ahead or going back over ground.
5. Sum­ma­rize all deci­sion and record them straight away with the name of the per­son respon­si­ble for any action

Easy, right? Well, maybe not so easy in prac­tice, but these steps can, at the very least, illu­mi­nate what’s wrong with your meet­ings, which may cur­rent­ly resem­ble one of Cleese’s many par­o­dies of busi­ness cul­ture. Nobody video­phoned it in at the time, but try­ing to fig­ure out who’s sup­posed to be doing what can still take up an after­noon. Let Cleese’s five steps bring order to the chaos.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Cleese on How “Stu­pid Peo­ple Have No Idea How Stu­pid They Are” (a.k.a. the Dun­ning-Kruger Effect)

John Cleese Revis­its His 20 Years as an Ivy League Pro­fes­sor in His New Book, Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years

Mon­ty Python’s John Cleese Cre­ates Ads for the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion

John Cleese’s Very Favorite Com­e­dy Sketch­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.