Why Good Process Matters and How to Get it Right.

Jacob Malthouse
Nov 7 · 5 min read

The Europeans call a nonprofit that organizes powerful people to do things a “secretariat”. It’s a great term because you are basically a secretary. It manages to smack of elitism and be head-pattingly condescending at the same time.

Be proud, helper monkey.

You can say that you work at the secretariat for fancy sounding acronym and people will think you are special. But you are effectively the person that runs out to grab stray tennis balls during a match.

I saw people deal with that dichotic existence in two ways. Some became secretly ashamed of their work. They then expressed these feelings by acting hugely arrogant and having strong opinions about everything. Others saw it for what it was and downplayed it.

I fell in the latter category and imagined myself a cheerful helper monkey. The hidden downside of this is that it accelerates burnout. If you describe your work as being a helper monkey eventually you get pretty down on your work. I don’t know the solution for that. In the end I made my peace with it by deciding I’d rather be burned out than a perpetually arrogant and insecure mid-level United Nations official.

Being a good helper monkey is not as easy as it sounds. Especially when you are dealing with exceptionally big egos, straddling four continents, that are kind of in competition with one another, and who are pretty skeptical of you and your work. I learned a couple of tricks that seem to still hold true even fifteen years later.

busy people who are volunteering their time have the thinnest margin for bullshit possible.

I reasoned that busy people who are volunteering their time have the thinnest margin for bullshit possible. You have no room for failure. Failure occurs the instant someone becomes annoyed because you have wasted their time. They simply demote you from their attention queue.

I almost immediately gave up on documents of any kind. Documents need to be opened and the formatting is unreliable. Programs can crash or do unforeseen shit. If someone opens your word document and word crashes, you just wasted 5 minutes of their time.

So I set up an email list and did everything by plain text email. The only formatting was all caps and dashes to separate text and identify headings. I set up templates for conference call agendas, meeting minutes, and updates. They were dead simple and never changed.

I delivered minutes to the group on the same day as the call. Ideally within a couple of hours. All minutes and announcements were completely stripped of detail apart from decisions made and key points of contention. That made them both easy to write and easy to digest.

I also wanted to cover my rear. I set up an internal web page that listed everyone’s contact information and logged all minutes, updates and other documentation. I included the link at the bottom of every email. I’m pretty sure no one ever checked it. At the same time, no one could ever accuse me of hiding or losing anything. It was a trust building measure.

Call logistics were painful and required more systematization. I found that the only time for a meeting that worked across all continents was 1500 (3pm) Central European Time. I used a 24 hour clock so there could be no misunderstanding about timing.

I held calls at the same time, all the time. During the first few meetings, we would frequently have people calling in late, dropping off the call, or being unable to hear what was going on. This was before Skype, Zoom and Internet calling made things somewhat easier.

My solution, and I still recommend this for international work regardless of what service you are using, is to have a live operator whose job it is to get and keep people on the call. They even muted noisy lines.

Swisscom — the Swiss telecommunications network — had an amazing service. A chipper Swiss operator would pre-call all of my participants. She would monitor the call and immediately dial out to anyone who got cut off or had a bad line. It was heavenly. I used it all the time.

Helper monkey swag circa 2003.

As this work began to scale up I used it so much that Swisscom sent me a branded Swiss army knife with an altimeter in thanks. I still have it. After about two years of becoming completely reliant on this service Paul received a complaint from UN operations and I found out why they sent me some swag. Our unit had the third highest phone bill out of all of the UN operations in Geneva. We kept using it anyway. It was that good.

I made a point of phoning each participant the day before the meeting. Often I just got sent to voicemail. If someone was up for a chat I was able to talk them through the agenda, give context on what was being discussed, and share how the other members of the group were thinking about things. Those conversations were critical.

They are informal, informative and serve as glue that holds a group together. Also Carlos didn’t do email. He felt it would belittle his stature to write little messages back and forth. Secretarial. A lot of senior executives in banking were like that. Appearances and the minutiae of power were extremely important. In reality, there was little to differentiate one fund manager from another. They were Indonesian birds of paradise. A lot of effort was spent on preening.

The Americans always responded to emails. In America, you preen by showing off how much work you can do. A colleague of Mary Jane’s at Citigroup was back at work three weeks after having a baby. I barely noticed her absence. In Canada parental leave is now 18 months. I can’t help but think that even if America implemented universal parental leave no one would take it just to show how hardcore they are.

Always get on a call 10 minutes before the time. Make sure everything is live. Keep calls under an hour. Because the table was set properly, Carlos and Vincent were able to run through the agenda quickly and efficiently.

All of this might seem nit-picky, but it made the rest of my job a lot easier. Setting a high bar for the functioning of a group directly impacts the quality of the substantive work that the group undertakes.

The more we did this, the more routine it became. The focus turned to the effort itself.


Artificial Heart

The Principles for Responsible Investment Story

Jacob Malthouse

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I love to explore connections between technology, society and planet.

Artificial Heart

The Principles for Responsible Investment Story

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