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:
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, 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.
2. 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.
Submitted by Mike, Broomfield, Co.
