EppsNet

• HarvardBusiness.org: Take Back 10 Minutes http://web.hbr.org/e/?e=mt&d=121409 #

I’ve got a manager’s meeting later this morning to address the question “What is the impact of passive-aggressive team members?”

Possible responses:

• “How should I know?”
• “Why am I always the first person called on? This is so unfair.”
• Roll eyes and sigh loudly.
• Show up late for the meeting and avoid eye contact with anyone.

[W]hat … meetings are doing is playing out an emotional drama–conflict, blaming, flirting, one-upsmanship, random outbursts, anger, and so forth….the soap-opera aspects of meetings are the most exciting parts of their jobs….

Indeed, these people are often upset if I show them how to conduct well-run meetings, because I’ve taken all the joy out of their lives.

— Gerald M. Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting: Why We Love and Hate Meetings

I had a great meeting today — eight women plus myself.

That’s not why it was great though.

These ladies want to launch an online Education Room with webinars, a speaker directory, announcements of upcoming events . . . they have none of the content ready . . . and they want to launch it on Jan. 1, 2009.

So instead of talking about how they’re planning to get the content to me so I can build the thing, they’re saying things like, “When you hover over a webinar link, it will display a description of the content — like on Netflix . . .”

Netflix. Right. So I say, “You’re not gonna get that.”

Oh, they loved it! They laughed and laughed. They knew it was ridiculous, they just wanted someone to tell them it was ridiculous.

Women love a masterful man who’s good at his work.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

I’m going to start declining invitations to meetings that have

1. vague goals;
2. a long list of invitees who don’t know how to come to the point;
3. a moderator who doesn’t know when to cut people off.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

• Always pretend to know more than anybody else
• Police your employees by every procedural means
• Have your professionally-trained staff members do technicians’ work for long periods of time
• Erect the highest possible barrier between commercial decision-makers and your technical staff
• Don’t speak to employees on a personal level, except when announcing raises
• Be the exclusive spokesman for everything for which you are responsible
• Say yes to new ideas, but do nothing about them
• Call many meetings
• Put every new idea through channels
• Worry about the budget
• Cultivate the not-invented-here syndrome

— via MIT OpenCourseWare