[Infowarrior] - It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners

[Richard Forno]

At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: June 21, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/us/22smartphones.html?hp

Smartphone use has become routine in meetings in the corporate and  
political worlds but retains the potential to annoy.

For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to  
see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs,  
the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr.  
Hobbs and his colleagues wondered what the man could possibly be doing  
with his phone for the length of a summer blockbuster.

Someone peeked over his shoulder. “He was playing a racing game,” Mr.  
Hobbs said. “He did ask questions, though, peering occasionally over  
his iPhone.”

But, Mr. Hobbs added, “we didn’t say anything. We still wanted the  
business.”

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in  
the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in  
to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists  
say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as  
ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real- 
time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

In Hollywood, both the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent  
Agency ban BlackBerry use at meetings. Tom Golisano, a billionaire and  
power broker in New York State politics, said last week that he pushed  
to remove Malcolm A. Smith as the State Senate majority leader after  
the senator met with him on budget matters in April and spent the time  
reading e-mail on his BlackBerry.

The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds  
— and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in  
May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site,  
said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent  
said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless  
devices.

Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the  
favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do  
it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private  
and public sectors.

A few years ago, only “the investment banker types” would use  
BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a  
company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment  
systems. “Now it’s everybody.” He said that if he spotted 6 of 10  
colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.

It is routine for Washington officials to bow heads silently around a  
conference table — not praying — while others are speaking, said  
Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham  
Clinton. Although BlackBerrys are banned in certain areas of the State  
Department headquarters for security reasons, their use is epidemic  
where they are allowed.

“You’ll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a  
submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting,” Mr.  
Reines said. “BlackBerrys have become like cartoon thought bubbles.”

Some professionals admitted that they occasionally sent mocking  
commentary about the proceedings, but most insisted that they used  
smartphones for legitimate reasons: responding to deadline requests,  
plumbing the Web for data to illuminate an issue under discussion or  
simply taking notes.

Still, the practice retains the potential to annoy. Joel I. Klein, the  
New York City schools chancellor, has gained such a reputation for  
checking his BlackBerry during public meetings that some parents joke  
that they might as well send him an e-mail message. Few companies have  
formal policies about smartphone use in meetings, according to Nancy  
Flynn, the executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a consulting  
group in Columbus, Ohio. Ms. Flynn tells clients to encourage  
employees to turn off all devices.

“People mistakenly think that tapping is not as distracting as  
talking,” she said. “In fact, it can be every bit as much if not more  
distracting. And it’s pretty insulting to the speaker.”

Still, business can be won or lost, executives say, depending on how  
responsive you are to an e-mail message. “Clients assume they can get  
you anytime, anywhere,” said David Brotherton, a media consultant in  
Seattle. “Consultants who aren’t readily available 24/7 tend to  
languish.”

Playful electronic bantering can stimulate creativity in meetings, in  
the view of Josh Rabinowitz, the director of music at Grey Group in  
New York, an advertising agency. In pitch meetings, Mr. Rabinowitz  
said, he often traded messages on his Palm Treo — jokes, ideas,  
questions — with colleagues, “things that you might not say out loud.”

The chatter tends to loosen the proceedings. “It just seems to add to  
the productive energy,” he said.

But business relationships can be jeopardized. Lori Levine, the  
founder of Flying Television, a talent-booking agency in Manhattan,  
said that in an effort to be environmentally sensitive she instructed  
employees to take notes on BlackBerrys instead of paper during client  
meetings.

“Then I got a call from a client screaming that our vice president  
spent an hour on his BlackBerry during a huge meeting,” Ms. Levine  
recalled. To soothe the client, Ms. Levine read aloud the notes the  
vice president had taken.

In Dallas, a college student sunk his chance to have an internship at  
a hedge fund last summer when he pulled out a BlackBerry to look up a  
fact to help him make a point during his interview, then lingered —  
momentarily, but perceptibly — to check a text message a friend had  
sent, said Trevor Hanger, the head of equity trading at the hedge  
fund, who was helping conduct the interview.

Very few companies have policies on smartphone use in meetings, which  
leaves it up to employees to feel their way across uncertain terrain.

To Jason Chan, a digital-strategy consultant in Manhattan, different  
rules apply for in-house meetings (where checking BlackBerrys seems an  
expression of informal collegiality) and those with clients, where the  
habit is likely to offend. There is safety in numbers, he added in an  
e-mail message: “The acceptability of checking devices is proportional  
to the number of people attending the meeting. The more people there  
are, the less noticeable your typing will be.”

Beyond practical considerations, there is also the issue of image. In  
many professional circles, where connections are power, making a show  
of reaching out to those connections even as co-workers are presenting  
a spreadsheet presentation seems to have become a kind of workplace  
boast.

Mr. Brotherton, the consultant, wrote in an e-mail message that it was  
customary now for professionals to lay BlackBerrys or iPhones on a  
conference table before a meeting — like gunfighters placing their  
Colt revolvers on the card tables in a saloon. “It’s a not-so-subtle  
way of signaling ‘I’m connected. I’m busy. I’m important. And if this  
meeting doesn’t hold my interest, I’ve got 10 other things I can do  
instead.’ ”