To make sure you are all deep diving from the same data, all singing from the same hymn sheet, all taking a holistic approach, all picking off the low hanging fruit, all creating stupid phrases that don’t mean anything to anyone.
I accept that meetings are needed now and again. You can’t get rid of them completely. Most people like them. You yourself, reading this article, probably relish a good 2 hour session in an over air conditioned room, with a splattering of your peers and fingers crossed, some sandwiches and milky tea.
I realise that I am in the minority but I am going to stick my neck out and admit I detest meetings. Dull, dull, dull. The worst meetings are with marketing people. ‘Creative types’ who can lose an entire morning discussing concepts and mind storming without ever putting a penny in the decision box.
I.T. meetings are also bad, but in a different way. It’s like attempting to woo an uninterested and diffident French woman when you don’t speak her language.
Meetings with our solicitors are also ‘fun’. Mainly because even basic questions will always receive 5 different scenarios of increasing apocalyptic severity in response. Still at least they treat us to nice nights out now and again.
But I do particularly dislike team meetings. These are guaranteed to degenerate into bilious bickering over grudges. Our last one wasted 20 minutes arguing about who’d taken someone’s special chair.
And finally project meetings. You are on a project to increase the use of the phrase ‘Work Rhythm’ in the office place and you have to meet people from Legal, from Facilities, from Finance and from Light Bulb Screwing. They all sit facing you blinking and wondering why you are about to waste an hour of their lives.
In summary if I wanted to sit in a room with a lot of self important piffle peddlers spitting their windy rhetoric into my face because they like the sound of their own voices and think they have SOMETHING. VERY. IMPORTANT. TO. SAY. then I would become friends with the poo-stained-pants man who screams at the pigeons in my local park.
But like I said, I am in a minority.
