Surviving Business Meetings: a How-to Guide ------------------------------------------- (by Madison Sterling) To really succeed in a business or organization, it is sometimes helpful to know what your job is, and whether it involves any duties. Ask among your co-workers. "Hi," you should say, "I'm a new employee. What is the name of my job?" If they answer "long-range planner" or "lieutenant governor," you are pretty much free to lounge around and do crossword puzzles until retirement. Most jobs, however, will require some work. There are two major kinds of work in modern organizations: 1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings. 2. Going to meetings yourself. Your ultimate career strategy will be to get a job involving primarily No. 2 (going to meetings yourself) as soon as possible, because that's where the real prestige is. It is all very well and good to be able to take phone messages, but you are never going to get a position of power, a position where you can cost thousands of people their jobs with a single boneheaded decision, unless you learn how to attend meetings. The first meeting ever was held back in the Mezzanine Era. In those days, Man's job was to slay his prey and bring it home to Woman, who had to figure out how to cook it. The problem was that Man was slow and basically naked, whereas the prey had warm fur and could run like an antelope (actually, it was an antelope, but this was not known at the time). At last someone said, "Maybe if we just sat down and did some brainstorming, we could come up with a better way to hunt our prey!" It went extremely well, and sitting in a circle made them warmer, so they agreed to meet again the next day, and the next. However, the women pointed out that, prey-wise, the men were not producing anything, and the human race was pretty much starving. The men agreed that this was a serious problem, and promised to put it at the top of their "agenda." At this point, the women, who were primitive but not stupid, started eating plants, and thus agriculture was born. It never would have happened without meetings. The modern business meeting, however, might better be compared with a funeral, in the sense that it is a gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable clothing and would rather be somewhere else. The major difference is that most funerals have a definite purpose. Also, nothing ever really gets buried in a meeting. An idea may seem dead, but it will always reappear at another meeting later on. If you have ever seen the movie "Night of the Living Dead," you have a rough idea of how modern meetings operate, with projects and proposals that everyone thought were killed constantly rising up from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living. There are two major kinds of meetings: 1. Meetings that are held for basically the same reason that Arbor Day is observed -- namely, tradition. For example, a lot of managerial people like to meet on Monday, just because it's Monday. You'll get used to it. You'd better, because this type of meeting accounts for 83% of all meetings (based on a study in which I wrote down random numbers until one of them looked good). These meetings usually operate the way "Show and Tell" does in nursery school, with everyone getting a turn to say something, except that in nursery school, the kids actually have something to say. When it's your turn, you should say that you're still working on whatever it is you're supposed to be working on. This may seem pretty dumb, since you're obviously working on whatever you're supposed to be working on, and even if you weren't, you'd say you were, but that's the traditional thing for everyone to say. It would be a lot faster if the person running the meeting would just say, "Everyone who is still working on whatever he or she is supposed to be working on, please raise your hand." You'd be out of there in five minutes, even allowing for jokes. This is probably what they do in Japan. But it's not how we do it in America. 2. Meetings where there is some alleged "purpose." These are trickier, because what you do depends on what the "purpose" is. Sometimes it is harmless, such as someone wanting to show slides of pie charts and give everyone a big, fat report. In this case, all you have to do is sit there and have elaborate fantasies, and then take the report back to your office and throw it away, unless, of course, you happen to be a vice-president. If you are a vice-president, write the name of a subordinate in the upper right hand corner of the report, followed by a question mark, like this: "Norm?" Then you send it to Norm and forget all about it (although it will plague Norm for the rest of his career). Sometimes, however, you will end up in a meeting where the purpose is to get your "input" on something. This is very serious, because what it means is that in case whatever it is turns out to be stupid or fatal, they want to make sure you get some of the blame. If you find yourself in a meeting of this kind, you must find a way to escape before they can ask you about anything. One proven method is to set fire to your tie. Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the meeting to announce that you have a phone call from someone very important, such as the president of the company or the Pope. Make sure it's one or the other, however. It would sound fishy if the accomplice announced, "You have a phone call from the president of the company, or the Pope." At any meeting, you should be prepared to take notes. Use a yellow legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it twice. Then wait until an important person, such as your boss, starts talking. Look at him with an expression of enraptured interest, as though he is revealing the secrets of life itself. Then draw interlocking rectangles, like this: ------------------- | | | ----+------------- | | | | --------------+---- | | | ------------------ If somebody falls asleep in a meeting, have everyone else quietly leave the room. Then collect a group of total strangers off the street and have them sit around the sleeping person until he wakes up. At this point, one of them should say to him, "Bob, your plan is very, very risky. However, you've given us no choice but to try it. I only hope, for your sake, that you know what you're getting yourself into." Then they should file quietly out of the room.