Still have one-on-one meetings for work? Well done, you're one of the elite

Great matters of state distil into kneecap-grazing, witness-free negotiation and ultimatum in inner office, diner booth – and bedroom

Boyd Tonkin
Friday 22 January 2016 17:53 GMT
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The machinations of plutocrats or presidents pivot on the cosy tête-à-tête behind closed doors
The machinations of plutocrats or presidents pivot on the cosy tête-à-tête behind closed doors

A frazzled executive barks into the phone as he scans his diary. “No, Thursday’s out. How about never – is never good for you?” Great cartoonists, like the builders of Gothic cathedrals, too often lapse into anonymity. So all hail Bob Mankoff of The New Yorker, who coined this classic in 1993. He has since drawn a follow-up, in which Death knocks on the door to demand some – interminable – quality time. “How about never – is never good for you?” pleads the panic-stricken householder. “Cute,” replies the Grim Reaper. “Let’s go!”

In the age of Skype and smartphones, hot-desking and teleworking, the “How about never?” tendency now runs the show. For office drones on short-term contracts or freelancers on long digital leashes, face-time beyond the briefest of briefings becomes a scarce luxury or a dim legend.

Private meetings or even group discussions, as opposed to command-and-control rallies staged by the boss class, become a board-level luxury or privilege. Isolated in home offices or stacked in corporate warehouses, workers shrink into quasi-robotic extensions of screens and phones, easily replaceable carbon-based apps. In place of enrichment and education through working-hours encounters, they have to “network” with other screwed-down hi-tech helots at their own expense. Their superiors, however, still love to meet and greet. In the air, elite seats thrive. One boutique service, La Compagnie, runs business-class-only flights from London and Paris to New York. Fares for a return flight next week range from £1,152 to £3,078.

As another global downturn looms, the status of eyeball-to-eyeball negotiation can only rise. Look, for instance, at the market for private jets. Last year, the Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier put development of its small Learjet 85 on hold as the super-rich cut back. However its US rival Gulfstream flew ahead in the construction and sales of larger and longer-haul private jets such as the G650. It costs a modest $66.5m (£46m). That model would suit a top-salary posse (of up to 18 passengers) rather than a solitary billionaire, president or superstar plus a handful of minders. Evidently, both maker and buyers are gazing beyond current economic fears towards a rosier horizon.

Whether Learjets, Gulfstreams or Dassaults, a large proportion of the planet’s personal jets will have landed somewhere near Davos recently. The annual World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort offers snow-flecked proof that the top brass still converse in person while the poor bloody infantry emails and Skypes. For their fee of $19,000, the 2,500 invited guests rub cold shoulders with 1,000-plus CEOs, 40 political leaders and an assortment of celebs which this year included Leonardo di Caprio, will.i.am, Bono and Kevin Spacey. For “Davos Man” (so dubbed by the political thinker Samuel Huntington, and 82 per cent of participants are male), desk-bound research or conference calls will never substitute for high-altitude, high-status exchange.

The paradox of globalisation, Davos style, is that its massive transnational forces depend, in the last instance, on small-group or one-to-one debates, dialogues and pacts.

Diplomacy, like politics and trade, has always worked this way. Not only the machinations of plutocrats or presidents pivot on the cosy tête-à-tête behind closed doors in (these days) smoke-free rooms. In thrall to the mass movement or the big picture, radicals and idealists tend to minimise the human factor. It has nasty habit of coming back to bite them. Thus the “new politics” downsizes into the ferocious semi-secret duelling of a Shadow Cabinet re-shuffle.

At Davos, Kevin Spacey – who so chillingly plays President Francis J Underwood in the Netflix series House of Cards – will have turned more heads than many actual leaders. In their Machiavellian roles, Spacey and his First Lady Robyn Wright (who makes Lady Macbeth look like a vegan dog-walker) deliver a joint master class in the sheer privacy of power on its topmost rung. Great matters of state distil into kneecap-grazing, witness-free negotiation and ultimatum in inner office, diner booth, car seat – and bedroom.

Shakespeare got there first, of course. Wickedly well-scripted as it is, no scene in House of Cards can match the final confrontation in Richard II between the defeated King and his usurper, Henry Bolingbroke. A kingdom shrinks into the staccato to-and-fro of victor and vanquished: “I have no need to beg,” the desperate Richard says. “Yet ask.” “And shall I have?” “You shall.” “Then give me leave to go.” “Whither?” “Whither you will, so I were from your sights.” “Go, some of you, convey him to the Tower.” Statecraft, command, authority reduce down to this brutal mano a mano showdown. To rule means knowing how to win not just in public but in camera, and in single combat.

Sometimes, at least in theory, the clinching face-to-face encounter may follow the laws of a win-win rather than a zero-sum game. Unless it turns sour, the deal finalised a week ago in Vienna between Western nations and Iran looks like a textbook case of mutual benefit.

Notice, though, how the clash of ideologies, systems and world-views resolved into the narrow focus of confidential meetings between the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, and his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. As the parties wrangled in public over nuclear non-proliferation, in secret talks they hammered out the details of a sensitive prisoner exchange. Jessica Schulberg of the Huffington Post – an old-school sleuth who relies on sources you won’t find with any search engine – has revealed that “Kerry and Zarif deliberately kept the talks separate from the nuclear negotiations, never raising the two topics in the same meeting”. You will hardly achieve a Vienna quality of handshake on email and Skype.

This week also saw the death, after 96 adventurously active years, of the publisher George Weidenfeld. Double-edged tributes routinely describe him as the supreme schmoozer. That sort of backhanded non-compliment combines barely-veiled anti-Semitism with genteel outrage that charm, persistence and negotiating skills might carry a Viennese refugee further in British professional life than membership of the right class, college, investment bank or – in the old days – regiment.

Lord Weidenfeld elevated the face-to-face principle into a fine art. Sometimes he lost money, on the memoirs procured at such a cost in time and talk as well as cash, from De Gaulle, Kissinger and other Davos-level personalities. Not merely business acumen drove him but a love of the chase and the deal, which had to be up close and personal. It took a decade of visits to John Paul II at his summer palace of Castel Gandolfo to secure the late pope’s final testament, Memory and Identity.

In commerce or politics, small-scale summitry may do harm as well as good. Another timeless cartoon tells that story. In 1939, David Low greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact with a drawing of Hitler and Stalin doffing caps across a corpse-strewn battlefield. “The scum of the earth, I believe?” the Führer courteously enquires. “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?” the Soviet tyrant responds. Many war-weary Europeans reacted with equal cynicism when, in 1945, the “Big Three” – Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt – convened at Yalta to carve up the post-war continent. “Jaw-jaw”, as Churchill stated, may indeed be better than “war-war”. It still depends on whose jaws have the final say.

Tête-à-tête gambits, trades, truces and fixes remain a jealously-guarded prerogative of power. In the firm or in the state, the degree of authority often correlates inversely with the number of people in a room. From the “kitchen cabinet” of Harold Wilson to the “sofa government” of Tony Blair, small-group or bilateral decision-making has picked up a bad name, but it remains as popular as ever. Henry Kissinger never scorned the EU by asking, “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?”, and disowned that quote. Yet the spread of such an apocryphal one-liner teaches a lesson – in this case, about the hunger for, and expectation of, intimate and deniable deal-brokerage among the Davos class.

Listen to Margaret Thatcher, praising Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1984, after the pair had fruitfully met but before he took over as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party: “I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together. We both believe in our own political systems… We are never going to change one another.” Except that, arguably, they did. “Doing business together”, one on one, can lead down an unmapped path to unmarked treasure.

The “How about never?” camp may save time, spare expenses, but lose the plot. People who have never read Rudyard Kipling know that his Ballad of East and West begins with the line “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”. Less famously, it ends with the avowal that “there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,/ When two strong men stand face to face though they come from the ends of the earth!”

Late-Victorian machismo? For sure. But that’s not the whole story. The poem recounts a pact born in mutual respect from a head-to-head encounter between a British officer’s son and a bandit clan on the North-West Frontier. These days, we might call it “talking to terrorists”.

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