In praise of the business lunch

I seem always to be in a hurry…

It is a strength as well as a weakness. An essential part of my nature it is hard to shake off. It does enable me to get a lot done though but needs to be tempered sometimes. Helpfully, I am also good at planning and prioritising my time, which makes a potentially stressful work life more manageable, and I have got better at it with experience.

One of the things I have learned to place importance on and prioritise are relationships, because I’ve noticed over the years that good relationships are an important ingredient in building a fulfilling career. They allow trust and respect to develop between people, improve your understanding of others and what makes them tick. This is itself one of the more rewarding aspects of work if you are interested in people. In truth relationship capital is the most valuable of soft assets. I have found it one area of life which should not be rushed. Hence my advocacy for the business lunch.

The three-martini lunch was famous in the USA, it was rather glamorised once and sounded quite attractive but is now in quite steep decline I believe over there. That decline, courtesy of a potent cocktail of well documented business and social trends. The rather excessive volume of martinis consumed would be a legitimate cause for consternation but the other defining characteristic of the lunch, an extended duration, less so in my view. These things should not be rushed.

I have had the pleasure of many long business lunches over the last twenty-five years and find them absolutely the best way to get to know someone. Twice a year is a good number with the same person, six months of news and events to catch up on. I make it a rule to spend 80% of the time not talking about business if I can and allow three hours in my diary. I find two person lunches the best but book a table for three to allow plenty of space. Nothing worse than being cramped, overheard or inadvertently listening to someone else’s conversation.

I also take great care in choosing the venue to try to make it a memorable occasion for both of us, comfortable, with good food and friendly discreet service. Such places are not so easy to find, so I have an address book of favourites.

Many of my best business friends will recognise this modus operandi. Jeremy who I first met when he was MD of a client’s UK business well over twenty years ago is now retired but still a regular lunch partner and good friend. Our relationship spanned his six years in Asia and two-year sojourn at the US Head Office. I visited him in both places. Now retired we last had lunch in the Autumn in one of our favourite London restaurants and met with our wives for dinner more recently. I enjoyed watching his career develop on its upward curve, learned plenty from him and hope to have helped him a little along the way with the odd idea or even simply as a trusted sounding board for his own thinking.

Peter, now also retired was CEO at another client and has been a regular lunch friend for two decades. He has held my feet to the flame on many of my more recent endeavours making sure I followed through on commitments mentioned at a previous lunch. Martin ex Gouldman Sachs, I remember advised me repeatedly when we’d meet for lunch to get checked for prostate cancer, which he wished he’d done earlier himself. I eventually followed up on that advice several years ago partly rather than admit at our next lunch that I hadn’t got around to it. John a more recent acquaintance who I have been getting to know better over the last couple of years and who runs his own restaurants rather well.

Over the years I have also made time to take colleagues out for a long lunch to catch up with them on things other than their daily priorities and find out a little more about them and their lives.  I used to have a regular cooked breakfast on a Monday morning in the local café with my then assistant Heidi, we would plan the week and catch up over a leisurely forty minutes.

Many ex-employees are still friends, and I watch their onward progress with interest, sometimes even their retirement. One retrained and became a maths teacher. One is now a highly successful CEO; another has moved back to South Africa, and one publishes books. Heidi and I had lunched a year ago to catch up, ten years plus after she’d moved on from us.

When I set up forward thinking inc in 1998 one of my missions was only to recruit people I really liked and who I thought suited the culture of the firm. It was to be a new priority afforded by the luxury of creating my own firm. This ruled out quite a few highfliers. The interviews were unusually long. I could quickly establish the candidates’ professional qualifications but getting to understand them as people took a little longer. I didn’t always get those hiring decisions right of course but more often than not did, perhaps because I took the time to get to know them a bit before we agreed to take the plunge together.

It has often been said, though less so now that business is about relationships, and I find that to be so.

So, before you double down on your workload and sweat your precious time, make some time for a business lunch. Pause for a few hours in your busy week, take comfort in one of a civilised life’s great pleasures and book a quiet table for three.