Thirty years inside corporate life. Plenty of material. Unfortunately, most of it is true.
The Meeting About the Meeting
In my 30+ years in the corporate world, I've spent a ridiculous amount of time in meetings. It's sad, really, how much time was wasted.
I can remember plenty of terrible ones. I struggle to remember many that were actually productive or useful in any way.
There were the face-time meetings. Not FaceTime on an iPhone. The kind where being physically present mattered more than getting anything done.
I'd fly to some distant city, spend four days in conference rooms, hotel restaurants and forced team-building exercises, all to build rapport and strengthen relationships. Four days that could probably have been boiled down to a one-hour conference call.
But the worst offenders were the meetings about meetings.
At several companies, I found myself in recurring meetings whose sole purpose was to prepare for other meetings. We'd discuss what to discuss, agree on what to prepare, and make sure everyone was aligned before the actual meeting.
Sometimes we even needed a meeting to finalize the agenda for the pre-meeting.
You can't make this stuff up.
After years of back-to-back meetings, discussing the same things, postponing the same decisions and running out of time to do my actual job, I started wondering:
When did attending meetings become a substitute for doing work?
Meetings aren't inherently bad. But somewhere along the way, corporate life started confusing activity with productivity.
Perhaps the best question before scheduling the next meeting is:
Could we just get the work done instead?
Welcome to Business Absurdities. Thirty years inside corporate life. Plenty of material. Unfortunately, all of it is true.
