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Let’s meet to plan our planning meeting

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People who have meetings to accomplish something

People who have meetings where they meet to plan a meeting where there will be planning to meet to devise a planning strategy for strategic meeting plans.

This morning, I woke up very early for a meeting.  At the conclusion of the meeting, we decided that the “next steps” were to have another meeting.  It is likely that this new meeting’s “next steps” will be to have yet another meeting.  ’Round she goes.

“As you see in this chart, the more meetings we have, the more money we spend paying the people in this room to listen to themselves speak.  I propose that we have breakout meetings to plan a discussion where we’ll bring more people in to understand this issue.  Then we’ll all come back and meet to discuss a plan for meetings.”

“AYE!!!”

It’s not that the meeting this morning didn’t have a purpose.  Actually, the meeting was to discuss how to produce some educational collateral.  All of the people that were needed to produce this were in the room.  But that didn’t mean that anything got done.

We kicked the meeting off with some highly-paid people carefully explaining a mix of half-truths and illogical concepts that accurately reflected their complete lack of understanding of what they do every day at work.  People like this, who spend every waking moment in meetings, only have brief collisions with reality throughout the day and therefore know very little about what’s going on.  That’s okay.  It happens.  Just shut the hell up.

Then one highly-paid person asks the group a question.  As an aside, every time an executive asks a group a question, I picture that executive promptly putting their fingers in their ears and screaming “LA LA LA LA LA…..I DON’T HEAR YOU…..LA LA LA LA!”, like kids did in 4th grade.  Anyhow, the question was asked, and right as the subject matter expert started explaining, another highly-paid jumps in and says “what so-and-so is trying to say is that the earth is more of a square than a circle and this table is made of grilled cheese sandwiches.”

The subject expert, now emasculated by the executive, has to figure out how to explain that the earth is, in fact, round and the table is made of wood, but he’s now in the dragon’s den: the highly-paid is watching and you’d better not directly contradict him.  It’s a delicate and highly-entertaining balance act to witness.  And now that everyone’s confused, we decide that another meeting is the right thing to do.

Gotta go.  You know why…

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November 12, 2008 | Filed Under at work 

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