I just want to stab my eyes out. Maybe stand up and scream at the top of my lungs “Will you get to the point! IS there a point?!” But of course I don’t. Instead I sit and wait for my turn to read the slide to the boss so he can make a comment about my information or ask a deep, incisive or insightful question where I of course have the answer (hopefully).
I read “Death by Meeting”, which isn’t a mystery novel about people dying in meetings, but actually a book about how to make meetings work. The author follows my own premise on meeting management and so I revere him as a genius and a prophet. I bought ten copies and gave them to people who need it. People who need it never read it….so it was a wasted effort. But in the event you ever want to make your own meetings better read the book.
Nobody else has read it or applies it to the meetings we have (another post to come on CUBs, BUBs, CUAs and RUBS covers meetings in more detail; good reading when you can’t sleep) but I did my part. “A prophet is never accepted in his home town” and a corollary is “nobody ever follows good advice, so feel free to give it whenever necessary” is cold comfort when you know you have another year at least of meetings.
Meetings, meetings and still more meetings. At least we aren’t Dilbert. Most of us want to be where we are and are proud to do our small part. We are small cogs in the big wheel of life. So instead we write down the words of brilliance that themselves stand in for original or coherent thought. The military metaphor, or rather the military usage of metaphors and applying them to the military. In any event writing down the clever phrases and using them in paragraphs later is great fun and a source of some amusement. Especially when it is a telecom where some of the most choice phrases have been found because without that activity there would be crickets on one end when the big boss would stop for a breath and say, “What do you think?” and require some words from the subordinate like “That is a great point sir” or “I never thought about it like that, sir” and so forth and so on.
Let me talk about meetings a little more. What does this sound like to you? If this sounds “smart” you really need to get out more…
“So let me peel back the onion on these things. I am going to put them under a microscope and really find out “who’s who in the zoo” so we can separate Joey from Jane. With meetings occasionally you need to get down in the weeds. Nobody likes meetings but sometimes you just have to suck that egg. Most of the time the low hanging fruit has already been covered and you gotta focus not only on the 25 meter target but also the 100 and 300 meter targets too. Some ideas in meetings are so new they are still on the napkin, but that isn’t an excuse to pop a red star cluster and hunker down for rescue. I want you to lean forward in the foxhole and really drill down to the eaches on the issues. We need to focus like a laser beam and realize that this isn’t easy. We are talking about Graduate level work now."
For pleasure and enjoyment you should try to use one or two of these every meeting and see what the result is. If people are nodding their heads north and south you are either in the army or in...the Twilight Zone.
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