I once consulted with a Fortune 100 company that was wasting huge amounts of time on nonproductive meetings. (Ever hear of that problem before? Perhaps nearby?) I found out within a week that any scheduled meeting was preceded by a half-dozen unscheduled meetings intended to deal with any conflicts in advance. Within this crazy paradigm, the company’s management thought that it could claim a consensus, collaborative approach.
What it had created was calamitous and chaotic.
It’s funny that when you get paid people tend to listen to you, so I convinced them to end the “pre-meeting meetings” cold turkey, and to adopt this phrase when conflict arose during the scheduled meetings: “Let’s put the dead rat on the table.” (No sense keeping it ...
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