LBJ would think walking meetings are pretty lame

The Wall Street Journal continues to go soft on us. I just read about "walking meetings," which are just what they sound like: conducting meetings while walking around. According to the Journal, these meetings are great for combating obesity and diabetes, and improving creativity. With meetings, phone calls and emails taking up more than 90 percent of the workday for some people (consultants like myself included), the Journal touts studies purporting to show the benefits of wandering around at work.Walking meetings aren't really new. Kaiser's Dr. Ted Eytan touted the idea on my blog five years ago.Sure it's good to get moving, and taking a walk can be just the thing to clear one's head, but when I'm in a meeting I'm usually taking notes and often viewing documents. Many meetings are confidential and sometimes they involve 10 or more people. So IMHO most serious meetings are not suitable for walking.When I was an economics student at Wesleyan in the 1980s, professor Stanley Lebergott told me about a pretty crazy job interview his colleague Douglas Cater had with Lyndon Johnson at the White House --swimming nude in the pool and having to keep up with Johnson while trying to answer questions. Although I believed my professor, you might not, so here's how it's recounted in Jack Valenti's memoirs:

I'll never forget the day LBJ brought Doug to the White House to sort of interview him. 'Let's go for a swim, Doug. Okay with you?' said the president. Well, of course it was, so Doug, Bill Moyers, and I followed the president to the swimming pool. Doug's eyes almost popped out when LBJ, Bill, and I threw off our clothes and jumped into the pool, nekkid, as we say in Texas. After a moment's hesitation, Cater stripped and plunged in, too.As we splashed around, the president began chatting with Doug about his ideas for making the Johnson administration more effective. I daresay, many of us have been interviewed in odd places, but as Doug said later, 'Nothing compares with my waterlogged birthday suit interview with the president.'

Compared to this, walking meetings are nothing. Can't the Journal find something more inspiring or scandalous to write about?—By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group.