As I drove around today doing my weekend chores I listened to Rod Stewart singing "Stay with me" on the radio. I must have heard this song a hundred times but this time I heard a line in the lyrics I had never hear before. I was perhaps concentrating properly.

This is not always what happens these days in business meetings. There has always been a good and a bad way to run meetings and indeed to behave in them. I remember being taught the basics of organising a meeting. Have a reason for the meeting in the first place, turn up on time, have an agenda and follow it, avoid distracting topics, finish on time and capture the agreed actions.

It is amazing how often these basic rules are not followed and meetings become a waste of time. But the point I want to make is that concentration at meetings has become much more difficult. Everybody at a meeting has a lap top and smart phone these days and whilst theoretically concentrating on the meeting can also be emailing, texting, instant messaging or simply Googling the latest stock market position.

Some of these activities can be very relevant to the meeting - like emailing an absent colleague for information or skyping a colleague in the meeting to give them some information helpful for the negotiation - but some are at best disruptive and at worst disrespectful and potentially damaging.

It seems to me that in addition to traditional good practice for meetings we now need to set some rules for how to behave and focus on the discussion. Sometimes laptops are helpful. At other times maybe they should be banned.

This Friday we went down to the seaside in Devon to see some close relatives for the weekend, leaving our large and energetic dog behind. He doesn't like very long car journeys. However our relatives also had a dog, very friendly like ours but calmer and we walked with her in a nearby park instead.

The whole weekend reminded me that a change of scenery can help to give a different perspective, not just on dog walking, but from which to view professional life. It enables the problems and challenges of the working week to be put into a different context and allows them to be seen them through another set of lenses.

I recall a major corporate negotiation in a central London venue that had become becalmed for some reason. The differences between the two sides seemed intractable. The lawyers were locked in an argument and there seemed no way forward. Then the senior executive from our client invited his opposite number for a walk in Hyde Park for a one on one discussion. It became known, with great originality, as "the walk in the park".

Quite miraculously the differences of opinion were sorted out during the walk. I am convinced that the change of scenery helped to put the lead executives from each party into a different environment which resulted in them agreeing the foundations of a constructive solution which unlocked the discussions.

So if stuck on a professional issue whether related to yourself or to your work I recommend "walking a different dog" not literally (you may hate dogs or be allergic to them) but in the metaphorical sense of finding some way of seeing things in a different light from which solutions can be derived.

I attended an excellent presentation on Monday evening this week. It was an SCL event and Richard Stephens was giving his very impressive annual round up of case law relevant to IT contracts.

It was a well attended session with some 100 lawyers present and definitely worth going to for the content alone. However what really surprised me was that when the talk finished,and the eminent law firm which hosted it offered wine and canapés, very few people stayed. Maybe 20. There was instead a long queue at the cloakroom as people beat a hasty retreat.

What is wrong with everybody? What is the point of all that network training law firms provide if it is not put into practice? Surely this was a great networking opportunity to meet other lawyers or reinforce connections you already had and also speak to the speaker who was there. I did all of these.

I found this simple but apt definition of "networking":

"interact with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts".

Have we lost the ability or inclination to do this? Are we maybe relying too much on LinkedIn or Twitter and other social media as a substitute for the real thing? Or maybe everybody was scurrying back to their offices to put some more chargeable hours on the clock?

If so shame on you - what a missed opportunity. The wine was good too!

Some things annoy you irrationally in professional life. I wish I had a pound for the number of times I have seen the phrase "wide range of..." in the context of marketing material or pitches by law and consultancy firms.

I saw it again in a presentation a week or so ago - "So and So has a wide range of experience of XXX contracts". I just picked a London law firm at random while composing this and did a search for "wide range" - and came up with 204 results.

But what does it actually mean? I searched the Oxford Dictionary which informed me that  "No exact match found for “wide range” in British & World English". Well that's impressive for a law firm to be using such an undefined phrase in their marketing material! I think where this is going is that precise use of words is important and not just in contracts. Explaining what a firm or an individual does to a potential client is possibly the difference to being instructed or not.

So I advocate being much clearer. In my own case instead of saying "Clive has a wide range of experience of IT contracting" I should say, by way of example, "Clive has experience of outsourcing, software, cloud and distribution contracts".

Anyway I hope others will listen and stop using the phrase "wide range" or at least use it a bit more selectively.