When two-time agency founder and Medical Advertising Hall of Fame inductee Charlene Prounis accepted MM+M’s offer to share some lessons from her legendary career, I suspected I’d come away from the exercise wiser than I was before it.
Over the course of my time at MM+M, Prounis has proven one of the few A-list/C-suite executives able to inspire from near and far. She was thus the natural choice to write the introductory essay to our presentation of MM+M’s 2024 Women of Distinction, which celebrates 31 of the industry’s preeminent leaders. Plus she was gracious enough to take on the assignment without making us resort to begging or bribery.
Yet of the 10 lessons Prounis shares in her essay, the one that immediately jumped out at me was the one that, on its surface, has little to do with professional development: Never eat alone.
It’s a piece of advice, frankly, I haven’t heeded often enough. As a time-stressed worker bee, I enjoy the great majority of my lunches at a posh urban bistro called My Desk. Dinners alternate between the kitchen table (on the nights when the kids don’t have an activity of some kind — which is to say, infrequently) and whatever fast-food joint happens to materialize on the side of the highway after the “I’m huuunnngggry!” alarm blares from the back seat.
What I miss amid the alternating solitude and chaos is the connection naturally forged during a shared meal — whether impromptu or planned in advance, at an upscale restaurant or on the curb next to a food truck. As Prounis writes: “Relationships and trust are keys to getting work done, and there’s nothing like talking to people over lunch to develop that.”
We got way too used to doing everything from a distance during the pandemic. Zoom meetings and the like serve a great many purposes in our professional lives, but they’re death for intimacy. Only by sitting down across from our peers (or our mentors, mentees, frenemies, heroes or antagonists) can we truly reestablish the bonds that have come unglued in the COVID era. And, you know, maybe learn something that will fortify us in our personal or professional lives.
So on behalf of myself and the other members of the MM+M editorial team, I’d like to extend an invitation: Let’s do lunch. We’ll banter. We’ll gossip. It’ll be fun.
