Thoughts on Meetings
Hey Kids!This was posted at http://writelarge.com/node/54 first.
Today's entry in my "Art of War" calendar is an excerpt from Chapter 1: "On assessments."
"Since you adapt and adjust appropriately in the face of the enemy, how could you say what you are going to do beforehand."
In other words, it's folly to try to explain what you're going to do before hand when what you are going to do depends largely on what happens at the event. This reminds me of the why I don't like going to meetings. In my four months working in a genuinely corporate environment, I have discovered that planning and meetings are a crutch of the weak and untalented. There is no reason to put more work into planning on how to do a task than you would put into actually doing the task in the first place, and the only reason most meetings happen is so that the weak and untalented have a paper trail that protects them when failure occurs.
I hate that the default setting in Microsoft Office is four a 1-hour meeting. Like Merlin Mann, I often wonder how much more could get done in a day if meetings were 10-15 minutes by default.