Meetings, meetings, meetings and even more meetings

I went to a big, corporate-style meeting the other day for the first time in a while. Actually, I used to spend almost all of my time in these meetings and you know the kind I'm talking about. A giant conference table with room for ten people on each side, spare chairs along the wall for the latecomers or the bag-carriers, coffee pots and paper cups on a little table in the corner. All guaranteed to destroy productivity for another hour or two. Remember when it was a big deal to go to such meetings? Remember when you'd phone your mum in an excited voice the night before your first one "mum, guess what, I've got a big meeting to attend tomorrow with all the department heads and the VP", and your mother would be impressed and say such platitudes as "well done son, you're certainly climbing the corporate ladder, aren't you."  You might even go so far as to tell your friends in a much calmer and cooler voice "yea, big day tomorrow, got a meeting with the boss, asked me to be there personally." Ah, those halcyon days when meetings seemed so important ...

... but those days have long passed for me, and now that I don't really have to pay attention because I'm too old for anyone to care why I am there, I am at liberty to look around at the active participants and have some fun trying to figure out everyone's agenda. Of course (well, not always) there is an OFFICIAL agenda for each of these meetings, but in a room full of 20 or so people, the diversity of the ACTUAL agendas is fascinating ...

• Someone wants to impress the boss and they always seem to do it by the most banal means possible. Jim, the department VP says something and two seats down, Jeremy immediately says "well, I think I've got to agree with Jim here," and then restates what Jim said in a much more roundabout fashion. Well "duh", Jeremy, OF COURSE you have to agree with Jim, he's your boss and you have the creative ability of a small rodent!
• Someone wants to show off their new Powerpoint that they spent most of last night perfecting. ‘Never mind the quality, feel the width' should be this person's motto as it REALLY isn't about the content, it is ALL about the colors and shapes and effects on the slides. I have to admit that I used to LOVE this one, and my fondest victory was when IBM bought Tivoli and all the Tivoli VPs gave our last in-house presentation. I spent a full week dubbing company exec voices onto the claymation video ‘Creature Comforts' for a 5 minute presentation JUST so I could beat the Marketing VP who usually won the ‘Powerpoint' competition hands down, but not this time!
• Someone wants to leave early for the next meeting and nowadays they are MUCH easier to spot than they used to be. Time was when you could spot this person by their constant watch-checking or looking at the clock, but cell phones have given this animal a whole new pattern of behavior. Now, they can surreptitiously text their secretary to "text me, for god's sake text me" and then, relatively guilt-free, they could grab their stuff, flash their phone at the assembled masses on their way out of the door and exclaim in a harried voice "sorry, late for my next one, gotta go." When I was with Dell for a number of years, it seemed like every manager's day would consist of a) getting in early so you could check the 300 irrelevant emails you had received overnight from the insomniacs/idiots on your staff and b) arriving late for your first meeting of the day because you'd been checking emails for 2 hours and then leaving subsequent meetings early so you could get to the next one without being too late. For a long time, I thought my job was NOTHING but 'meetings, bloody meetings'.
• Someone has a tee time and this one is sometimes difficult to spot, since IT summer-wear is invariably Polo golf-shirts for all, but watch for the guy twiddling with a tee and constantly checking the weather for rain. The TRUE diehard will sometimes even wear their golf shoes to the meeting (happened a couple of times), and I once saw someone actually bring their clubs into the meeting and lean them up against a corner of the room.
• Someone wants to hire a consultant. If there ISN'T a consultant in the room, then someone will invariably say "why don't we hire a consultant to look into this problem". If you are the boss, then BEWARE this person as they know something you don't.
• Someone wants to get the consultant fired If there IS a consultant in the room, then someone doesn't like it and they are trying to get rid of them. Watch for sentences starting with "Well, the consultant said ...", or "I think the consultant will agree with me when I say that ...".
• Someone wants to get even with a coworker. Very similar tactics to getting the consultant fired. Watch for the person who starts a sentence with "Mary said yesterday that she didn't think Jim's idea would work in our department," and then glance quickly at Mary's expression ... ooooh, if looks could kill.
• Someone wants to get the job done, but this is such a rare animal, and gets increasingly rare as one gets higher in the organization and gains political astuteness. In a room full of VPs, my experience is that NO-ONE really gives a damn about the real reason for the meeting, it's all about scoring points.
• Someone is flirting. This one is always fun to watch. Shy smiles across the table with absolutely NO focus on anything that is being said. Well-hidden footsy, that turns to an embarrassed flushing of the face if either party gets asked a question mid-flirt, and the dead giveaway is that one party gets a coffee and unbidden, gets the other party a cup at the same time and slides it across the table to them.

Now, I could go on, as I have seemingly spent half my career in such meetings. So much so that once I got to be a CEO, I swore to NEVER hold long meetings and the ONLY motivational poster I ever had on my wall was "Rome didn't build a great empire by holding meetings, they did it by killing everyone who opposed them."

Glyn Meek, with 40 years of experience in the technology industry, has earned his curmudgeonly outlook.