I can't be the only one surprised that everyone else seems to be forever tied up in meetings these days. Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one working at the coalface. This has me wondering what place the traditional "meeting" occupies in the modern UK organisation, characterised as it is by email, voicemail, the Web and text.

While telex, faxes and the company sports and social club have been consigned to the graveyard, legions of daily, back-to-back meetings gridlock our productivity. Either we are born with a predisposition towards chocolate biscuits and Blu-Tac, or there is something profound and enduring that drives us to keep on investing our precious time in sharing our opinions.
This is not inconsequential stuff. For as long as I can remember, we in the UK have been benchmarking our poor national productivity against that of the US, while at the same time trying to improve the output of publicly funded services, which themselves lag someway behind our private sector.
This is as hot a debate today as it was 25 years ago. As someone with experience of all three domains, I am convinced that our meetings culture lies at the heart of productivity differences.

If I call a US contact, they're unlikely to be in a meeting (being too busy actually getting stuff done). They're also discinclined to meet without an obvious reason for doing so. They just don't waste each other's time so much in corporate America.

Meetings are a way of getting the job done, not a reason to debate. Delivery of the mission is the focus. This is why Americans are all ears if you have something worth saying that contributes to their mission, and why it's so much easier to sell a good idea in the US. They're less enthused by consulting, chatting, or building political bridges-just ask Kofi Annan. Gossip and chatter is left to the TV. Their meeting culture is one that feeds faster decisions and improved delivery, it ratchets up energy levels, and it exists to drive more people to "get with the programme".

Compare the average US firm with a small company in the UK like my own, which works tirelessly at bringing the team together to voice their views and build understanding and agreement-awaydays, staff meetings, management meetings, appraisal meetings, systems meetings. The list is endless, and I haven't even mentioned customers and suppliers yet. This egalitarian approach to the deployment of meetings as a corporate tool displays a significant cultural difference. In the UK it's good to talk. In the US, it's better to work.

But even this small show seems productive when compared with "quangoland", where the meetings always revolve around political agendas. I recently chaired a crisis meeting of a publicly funded business, run by business people for businesses, where the board (which was dominated by small and medium-sized enterprise owner managers) was crystal clear from the start on what had to be done.

The political shareholders were desperate to interfere. The result was indecision, a senior team pulled from the front line, and a significant lump of taxpayers' money wasted; a clear case of shadow directorships.

If not about agendas over delivery, quango meetings often end up debating a new vision. In other words, lots of expensive people redefining their reason to exist. And let's not forget the pre-meetings. It's as though we are addicted to the sound of our own voices and feel we each deserve a seat in the House of Lords.

As our economies become ever more dominated by the service sector, our competitive position will continue to suffer, unless we choose to just get on with the job more often. The latest equipment and skills won't save us if we spend our days chatting in hotels.

A globally successful Korean businessman once remarked to me that in the UK, "when you come across a problem, you spend years researching, benchmarking and discussing the issue before making do. In Korea, we say, 'what problem?' and make do immediately. And we never lose our forward momentum."

So, is it time for a discussion and a debate?

Alex Pratt is the founder of thriving small business Serious Readers (www.seriousreaders.com) and an adviser to the UK government on innovation and skills