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 coworkers. "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, and, 2.
Going to meetings.
Your ultimate career
strategy will be to get a job involving primarily No.
2, going to meetings, 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 bonehead 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 for Woman, who had to figure out how to cook it.
The problem was, Man was slow and basically naked,
whereas the prey had warm fur and could run like an
antelope. (In fact it was an antelope, only nobody
knew this).
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, plus it
was much warmer sitting in a circle, so they agreed
to meet again the next day, and the next.
But the women
pointed out that, prey-wise, the men had not produced
anything, and the human race was pretty much starving.
The men agreed that
was serious and said they would put it right near the
top of their "agenda". At this point, the
women, who were primitive but not stupid, started
eating plants, and thus modern 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 you have 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 is really ever buried in a meeting.
An idea may look
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 rising up
constantly from their graves to stagger back into
meetings and eat the brains of the living.
There are two major
kinds of meetings:
- 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, because it's Monday.
You'll get used to it. You'd better, because
this kind account for 83% of all meetings (based
on a study in which I wrote down numbers
until one of them looked about right). This
type of meeting operates the way "Show
and Tell" does in nursery school, with
everyone getting to say something, the
difference being 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
obviously you'd be working on whatever you're
supposed to be working on, and even if you
weren't, you'd claim 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 what he or she is
supposed to be working on, raise your hand."
You'd be out of there in five minutes, even
allowing for jokes. But this is not how we do
it in America. My guess is, it's how they do
it in Japan.
-
- Meetings where
there is some alleged purpose. These are
trickier, because what you do depends on what
the purpose is. Sometimes the purpose is
harmless, like someone wants to show slides
of pie charts and give everyone a big, fat
report. All you have to do in this kind of
meeting is sit there and have elaborate
fantasies, then take the report back to your
office and throw it away, unless, of course,
you're a vice president, in which case you
write the name of a subordinate in the upper
right hand corner, followed be 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).
But sometimes you go
to meetings where the purpose is to get your "input"
on something. This is very serious because what it
means is, they want to make sure that in case
whatever it is turns out to be stupid or fatal,
you'll get some of the blame, so you have to escape
from the meeting before they get around to asking you
anything. One way is to set fire to your tie.
Another is to have
an accomplice interrupt the meeting and announce that
you have a phone call from someone very important,
such as the president of the company or the Pope. It
should be one or the other. It would a sound fishy if
the accomplice said, "You have a call from the
president of the company, or the Pope."
You should know how
to take notes at a meeting. Use a yellow legal pad.
At the top, write the date and underline it twice.
Now wait until an
important person, such as your boss, starts talking;
when he does, look at him with an expression of
enraptured interest, as though he is revealing the
secrets of life itself. Then write interlocking
rectangles like this:
(picture of doodled
rectangles).
If it is an
especially lengthy meeting, you can try something
like this (Picture of more elaborate doodles and a
caricature of the boss).
If somebody falls
asleep in a meeting, have everyone else leave the
room. Then collect a group of total strangers, right
off the street, and have them sit around the sleeping
person until he wakes up. Then have one of them 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.
