Speaker 1: From executive search to talent strategy, leadership development, rewards and
Speaker 1: succession planning. Corn Fairy can help you realize the full
Speaker 1: potential of your people so you can take your business
Speaker 1: where it wants to go up. Learn more at corn
Speaker 1: Ferry dot com, slash up forgive me listeners. But I'm
Speaker 1: going to go a little Andy Rooney here for a bit.
Speaker 1: Those pesky meetings, right, everybody hates them, and they're always
Speaker 1: under some form of constant improvement. There are any number
Speaker 1: of books, gurus, videos, articles that you can read to
Speaker 1: talk about how meetings are being revolutionized, disrupted, up ended,
Speaker 1: and yet we still have them, and most often they
Speaker 1: are terrible. This week on game Plan, we're talking about meetings. Hi, everybody,
Speaker 1: I am Sam Grobart. I am a writer at Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Business Week magazine. And I'm Rebecca Greenfield. I'm a reporter
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg Berg cover the work Place. And I will
Speaker 1: say Becca that the only meetings I actually enjoy our
Speaker 1: our meetings to talk about what we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1: You don't have to say that, no, but it's true.
Speaker 1: It's true. But most other meetings they're terrible. Well, they're
Speaker 1: just there are a lot of them. A lot of
Speaker 1: people think that they waste time and meetings and can't
Speaker 1: get actual work done. I think is one of the
Speaker 1: big problems absolutely, And in fact, we decided to go
Speaker 1: out and ask some of our coworkers what they thought
Speaker 1: about meetings, and we have some of those clips here now.
Speaker 1: I hate it when people schedule meetings and then canceled
Speaker 1: in period, but particularly when they do it at the
Speaker 1: last minute. For introductory meetings, when people ask you to
Speaker 1: say a fun fact about yourself, I can never think
Speaker 1: of a fun fact, and then usually just make something up.
Speaker 1: So no grandstanding, no putting people down, don't make stuff out.
Speaker 1: The most egregious sin one can commit is to come
Speaker 1: to a meeting without a plan. The worst thing that
Speaker 1: I think someone can do in a meeting is if
Speaker 1: they're in like the position of power and there's food
Speaker 1: at the meeting, I think the worst thing that they
Speaker 1: could do is to not eat. Not get the food
Speaker 1: and eat it, because then you're sitting there and everyone
Speaker 1: else is in the meeting and you're just like looking
Speaker 1: at this delicious looking food. Probably you haven't eaten all
Speaker 1: day because you've been waiting for this food, and you're
Speaker 1: just sitting there and the person in power is apparently
Speaker 1: not hungry. Apparently they don't spend all their time looking
Speaker 1: for free food around the office. Okay, so, yes, talk
Speaker 1: to me about the things that you don't like in meetings.
Speaker 1: So I think the thing I have to start with
Speaker 1: as the woman on this show is that, as a woman,
Speaker 1: you feel sometimes that meetings are the place where sexism
Speaker 1: is the most apparent in the workplace, which is really unfortunate.
Speaker 1: I'm constantly thinking about how I have to force myself
Speaker 1: to speak up. But then I know there has been
Speaker 1: research that has shown that women get interrupted more than men,
Speaker 1: and then also research that shows that women who do
Speaker 1: speak up are judged more negatively than men. So but
Speaker 1: if I don't speak up, then I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: not being a good employee. Right, So you're damned if
Speaker 1: you do, you're damned if you don't. Either you're going
Speaker 1: to be sort of quiet and mousey, or you're gonna
Speaker 1: be bossy and overly aggressive. But that's that is a
Speaker 1: perception out there, right, that's the problem, and it's real.
Speaker 1: It's totally real. The patriarchy is real. Yes, And furthermore,
Speaker 1: I would say totally acknowledging the point that you're making
Speaker 1: that meetings overall are often an odd sort of performance
Speaker 1: and even competition. And that goes for men too. Yeah
Speaker 1: that you know, people kind of come into them with
Speaker 1: a goal. The goal is not a successful meeting. The
Speaker 1: goal is a successful presentation of themselves. Yeah, you're selling
Speaker 1: yourself in the meeting. So you have to make the
Speaker 1: next funniest joke or or cut down the next idea
Speaker 1: that somebody has, or or be the first person to
Speaker 1: say the obvious idea, right, which is something I wrote
Speaker 1: about before I worked here at Bloomberg. Found this very
Speaker 1: popular article I wrote about brainstorming, and a lot of
Speaker 1: business school researcher types think brainstorming is really bad for
Speaker 1: coming up with ideas, which is the purpose of brainstorming,
Speaker 1: because of this thing called anchoring, where everybody rallies around
Speaker 1: the first idea, which is usually the most obvious idea. Sure,
Speaker 1: and you know it's funny. I was thinking about this
Speaker 1: actually in the context of web comments, that somebody they'll
Speaker 1: be commenting on an article and then somebody will make
Speaker 1: sort of an outlandish claim and then all the comments
Speaker 1: that follow are just about that one post. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you've completely moved on from maybe you know, the core
Speaker 1: definition of the article. And that's also true in meetings.
Speaker 1: So somebody says something and everybody now talks about that.
Speaker 1: Was that the thing that we should be talking about?
Speaker 1: Totally unclear, but that's what we're doing. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: business school term for that that I read about, also
Speaker 1: called conformity press. Sure. I think you see certain kinds
Speaker 1: of tropes pop up in meeting, certain types of characters.
Speaker 1: Like we've said, there's you know, the jokester. I hate
Speaker 1: the jokester. I'm usually the jokester. I'm sorry. I know
Speaker 1: I like laughing too. I like jokes too, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's just like, we get it, you're funny, I am, um.
Speaker 1: And then you have the critic, right, the naysayer. It's
Speaker 1: really easy to say something negative in a meeting. That's
Speaker 1: way easier than coming up with an original, good idea. Right.
Speaker 1: There's often times I feel the repeater, somebody who maybe
Speaker 1: quite artfully but nonetheless says exactly the thing that the
Speaker 1: person just before said. Because you feel pressure to say
Speaker 1: something in meetings. I think the tricken meetings is really
Speaker 1: not to say much of anything at all. But then
Speaker 1: you're wasting your time, which is why I think everybody
Speaker 1: feels about meetings. Well, people have been trying to get
Speaker 1: at the core of this issue for a long time,
Speaker 1: and we have one person with us here today who
Speaker 1: has tried to solve the problem in a very zen way. Um,
Speaker 1: for a number of years, he just didn't have any meetings.
Speaker 1: We are joined by Chris White, the founder and CEO
Speaker 1: of Viable Markets, and independent consulting firm that works in
Speaker 1: the financial industry. And the reason we have Chris with
Speaker 1: us here today is in part because he did something extraordinary. Chris,
Speaker 1: for two years, you, I understand, never called a meeting, right. Um.
Speaker 1: I was working for a major investment bank and I
Speaker 1: had been working there for about five years, but the
Speaker 1: last two years that I was there, I purposely employed
Speaker 1: a strategy of not calling any meetings. And what was
Speaker 1: ironic about it, or really surprising was I remember my
Speaker 1: boss pulling me aside one day and just saying, I've
Speaker 1: seen so much improvement from you over the past six months.
Speaker 1: And it was literally six months into me not calling
Speaker 1: any meetings. So um, it just started me thinking very
Speaker 1: differently about meetings. Why did you pursue that strategy of
Speaker 1: no meetings. What brought you to that decision, Well, Um,
Speaker 1: the type of work that I was doing was something
Speaker 1: that is a little bit nontraditional. Within an investment bank,
Speaker 1: my responsibility was to help the traditional sales and trading
Speaker 1: business modernize. And when you're dealing with businesses that make
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount of money and your job is to
Speaker 1: talk about change and to help the business progress, that's
Speaker 1: met with a lot of resistance because obviously that famous
Speaker 1: phrase if it ain't broke, don't fix it is sort
Speaker 1: of ingrained a lot of people's mentality. So though I
Speaker 1: was doing what I thought was right according to my
Speaker 1: my job title, it was not necessarily winning me any
Speaker 1: friends internally, So I had to figure out a different
Speaker 1: way to be influential. Wait, so when you were in meetings,
Speaker 1: when you were still doing meetings, it wasn't working well.
Speaker 1: For a very very long time, I've used meetings, um strategically,
Speaker 1: I think that there's a perception that decisions are made
Speaker 1: in meetings, and and that is something that is something
Speaker 1: I've just not experienced. In fact, it's very difficult to
Speaker 1: come to actual hardcore decisions within a meeting. Another reason
Speaker 1: why I stopped calling meetings is because one of the
Speaker 1: pieces of advice I was given by one of my
Speaker 1: superiors was that I had to know what everyone was
Speaker 1: going to say in the meetings that I was holding.
Speaker 1: So that meant that I would have to have bilateral
Speaker 1: meetings with every single individual prior to hosting the group meeting,
Speaker 1: and it became exhausting. Meetings on meetings, on meetings, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's meetings all the way down, Chris, I want to
Speaker 1: jump back to something you were just saying before. You
Speaker 1: said that a meeting is not a place for a
Speaker 1: decision to be made, right, tell me a little more
Speaker 1: about about that thinking. It depends on where you are.
Speaker 1: If you're in a startup or certain other environments, maybe
Speaker 1: not all of this applies, but certainly if you're working
Speaker 1: in corporate America, and particularly in the world of finance,
Speaker 1: there's a tremendous amount of risk to saying yes. So
Speaker 1: anytime you're trying to move something forward, you're actually waiting
Speaker 1: for somebody to say yes, let's do it. And when
Speaker 1: you call a meeting and there's everybody sitting in a room, um,
Speaker 1: it gets a lot harder. The larger the group, the
Speaker 1: bigger the meeting, the more senior people in the meeting,
Speaker 1: the harder it's going to be for you to actually
Speaker 1: get a yes. People are are pretty much convexed to
Speaker 1: say no because there's no risk to saying no, right
Speaker 1: because you never know what could have happened. You're not
Speaker 1: going to be responsible for the disaster of the yes.
Speaker 1: So normally, what what I think is the best use
Speaker 1: of a meeting and what your goals and expectations should be.
Speaker 1: Meetings are for status, and meetings are also for authority.
Speaker 1: When you do not have authority, that meeting status oh god,
Speaker 1: but good to know we're being honest. Well, it depends
Speaker 1: on who It depends on who you are in the meeting.
Speaker 1: So in my role, I'm not a I'm not a technologist,
Speaker 1: but I relied on the work of I T I'm
Speaker 1: not a lawyer, but I relied on the work of
Speaker 1: our legal and compliance department. And so I used these
Speaker 1: meetings as a form of authority because what it did
Speaker 1: is that they put transparency around their progress. And that's
Speaker 1: actually why I did it. So it was meant to
Speaker 1: be uncomfortable for them because they were being tasked and
Speaker 1: I knew that if they had said something last Thursday,
Speaker 1: in my next Thursday meeting, I could say, oh, John,
Speaker 1: last Thursday, you said that this would be done by Wednesday.
Speaker 1: What's the status? And that always makes someone feel uncomfortable
Speaker 1: if they if they're not following through. Well, that proves
Speaker 1: my suspicion in my own experience that many of the
Speaker 1: meetings that I have attended, which might be sort of
Speaker 1: a weekly meeting, sort of standing meeting to check on progress,
Speaker 1: the purpose of that meeting is the threat of shame
Speaker 1: if you have not met the deadline that you are
Speaker 1: going to talk about at that meeting. The meeting itself
Speaker 1: is just a way to get you to do your work. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is the beauty of human sociology. The biggest incentive
Speaker 1: behavioral incentive is how you appear to others. That's why
Speaker 1: I say a meeting can be your authority, depending on
Speaker 1: what position you're in. If you structure the meeting such
Speaker 1: that your process makes it transparent when somebody is not
Speaker 1: meeting their responsibilities, you're actually able to get really large,
Speaker 1: fantastic complex things done, even if you don't have direct
Speaker 1: authority over anyone in the room. Up happens when the
Speaker 1: power and potential of every employee and leader in your
Speaker 1: workforce is released, and corn Ferry can get you there
Speaker 1: by aligning your people to your strategy, attracting, developing, engaging,
Speaker 1: and rewarding them to reach new heights. With corn Ferry,
Speaker 1: you get a partner who truly understands people, leadership, and
Speaker 1: the new landscape of work, a partner who knows how
Speaker 1: to take your business up. Learn more at corn ferry
Speaker 1: dot com slash up. I want to go back to
Speaker 1: your two years son's meetings for a little bit. What
Speaker 1: were you doing to get things done then? Like, how
Speaker 1: did you run those big projects that you're working on? Well, Um,
Speaker 1: the way that I handled getting things done was I
Speaker 1: would just have many discussions with the people that I
Speaker 1: knew had the authority, and if I knew that that
Speaker 1: person needed reference information before making the decision, I would
Speaker 1: make sure to get a SoundBite from other people that
Speaker 1: I know they'd want to check in with. So Becca,
Speaker 1: I would I would go to you and I would
Speaker 1: talk to you about something. I'd say, do you think
Speaker 1: this is a good idea? And then you'd say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's a good idea, And then immediately, Sam,
Speaker 1: I'd come to you and I'd say, well, I was
Speaker 1: talking with Becca and you know what she thinks is
Speaker 1: a good idea, and then I would be basically move
Speaker 1: I can move things forward that way without necessarily positioning
Speaker 1: the initiative or what I was doing is being Chris
Speaker 1: White's idea, UM, which is is it's just not going
Speaker 1: to work unless it's Chris White's company, which is why
Speaker 1: I started my own company. It kind of reminds me
Speaker 1: of like a really good reporter who I sit near
Speaker 1: some really good reporters and yeah, they do a lot
Speaker 1: of I heard this thing from this person. What do
Speaker 1: you think about that? Totally? It is UM. It's a
Speaker 1: technique that I think UM comes quite naturally if you're
Speaker 1: having to talk about things or do things that people
Speaker 1: may not want to necessarily prioritize. Do you have any
Speaker 1: thoughts about when you're actually in the meeting sort of
Speaker 1: the tactics of that moment. Are there things that you're
Speaker 1: doing or not doing um? Other than having called the meeting?
Speaker 1: Of course, what you've explained sort of why the meeting exists,
Speaker 1: But what about actually when you're conducting the meeting? Sure,
Speaker 1: I like to let other people in the meeting do
Speaker 1: the talking, and all I was acting as is really
Speaker 1: the talk show host. UM. In that way, I think
Speaker 1: just people feel more engaged, they feel like they have
Speaker 1: a voice, they feel like they're being respected. There's nothing
Speaker 1: worse than sitting in a meeting for you know, forty
Speaker 1: five minutes and one person is talking on and on
Speaker 1: and on, and you're not hearing a different voice, and
Speaker 1: you're not hearing any sort of community within the discussion.
Speaker 1: So I always I always paid attention that. UM. I
Speaker 1: think it's especially important when you're working in a diverse
Speaker 1: work environment because there are politics at play that maybe
Speaker 1: we we don't sometimes notice where certain people get drowned
Speaker 1: out and if you don't give them at least some space,
Speaker 1: they're not going to be heard and their content isn't
Speaker 1: going to be appreciated. So I was really really conscious
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah, I think about that a lot in meetings.
Speaker 1: How I have to force myself to be heard sometimes
Speaker 1: not because anybody's malicious or doing anything, it's just you know,
Speaker 1: being a younger woman in the room, Yes, necessarily going
Speaker 1: to be the loudest person in the room. Well, did
Speaker 1: you I don't know if you guys had a chance
Speaker 1: to read this, but there was an article out about
Speaker 1: what the women who are part of the Obama administration
Speaker 1: do in the meetings, and what they do is when
Speaker 1: a woman says something, then another woman would repeat what
Speaker 1: that woman said, just to make sure that she was heard.
Speaker 1: I think it's a brilliant tactic because those dynamics are
Speaker 1: at play in some of these meetings. It's not just
Speaker 1: a gender. It could also be about age. I mean
Speaker 1: you mentioned being a younger woman in the room. People's
Speaker 1: listening ears sometimes turn off, um, depending on who's doing
Speaker 1: the talking. So the exact same thing can be said
Speaker 1: by two different people, but it will have varying different impacts, uh,
Speaker 1: depending on the source. It appears to me that from
Speaker 1: how you're describing your approach to meetings, I think it's
Speaker 1: actually a lot more methodical, and you you do have
Speaker 1: sort of a script almost and a and a plan
Speaker 1: as far as how the meeting is going to commence,
Speaker 1: who is going to speak within it, and what the
Speaker 1: objective is at the end. Whereas, honestly, and I've been
Speaker 1: guilty of this as well, meetings are often just called
Speaker 1: like hey, let's talk about X, you know, like Hey,
Speaker 1: we're all here, so uh, and there's no and then
Speaker 1: you spend twenty minutes shooting the talking about last night's debate, right,
Speaker 1: and then yeah, you do like brainstorming. That seems not
Speaker 1: that useful. There's no trajectory. Well, I think with regards
Speaker 1: to my own situation, there were specific things that I
Speaker 1: was trying to move forward, and so I was quite
Speaker 1: clear as to why I was using the meeting. If
Speaker 1: the meeting is just to kick around ideas, I think
Speaker 1: it is going to have that sort of looseness to
Speaker 1: it and it might meander, but I but I always
Speaker 1: was thinking of where the business needed to be six
Speaker 1: months from now, was based on the meeting that I
Speaker 1: was having that day. Um. And another thing that I
Speaker 1: did consistently and still do try to practice is to
Speaker 1: have that follow up email. I'm sure there are some
Speaker 1: some meetings you have where there's like the follow up email. Well,
Speaker 1: there's nothing gave me greater pleasure than to have somebody
Speaker 1: come to me, let's say, six weeks after something was
Speaker 1: in motion and say why are we doing this? Or
Speaker 1: I you know who signed off on this? And I
Speaker 1: would dig through my follow up emails and I'd say
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Um. On January ten, I sent out the
Speaker 1: status this is what was said. You were in the
Speaker 1: room at that time. You didn't raise an objection, And
Speaker 1: I really had to do that in the environment that
Speaker 1: I was in. I was working for large investment banks.
Speaker 1: You're dealing with, you know, really aggressive personality is a
Speaker 1: lot of you know, I would say a types in
Speaker 1: the room, and there's no way in terms of what
Speaker 1: I was doing and had to do a lot with
Speaker 1: technology and modernization, there was no way that I was
Speaker 1: going to run over anyone. That would just have made
Speaker 1: me completely ineffective in the world. So I had to
Speaker 1: figure out how to use their weight against them. And
Speaker 1: the best way to use someone's weight against them is
Speaker 1: to sort of bury them in a process, and then
Speaker 1: as they try to move outside of that process, you
Speaker 1: can kind of, you know, show them the evidence, um
Speaker 1: that you were following the steps and had been transparent
Speaker 1: with everyone. Yeah. I think that follow up email is
Speaker 1: definitely controversial, and I send them in our meetings when
Speaker 1: we talk about this show sometimes and I feel very
Speaker 1: self conscious because it feels kind of naggy almost you're
Speaker 1: going to do this, but it gets people to do
Speaker 1: stuff is and to your point, it creates a record,
Speaker 1: so it's not left to the sort of fuzzy memory
Speaker 1: of did you agree, did you not agree? I don't
Speaker 1: know who's to say totally. I mean, I was actually
Speaker 1: just having a conversation with a friend of mine on
Speaker 1: on the way up to this podcast, and he was
Speaker 1: complaining about a technology project that was running behind. And
Speaker 1: the advice that I gave him, I said, all you
Speaker 1: need is a simple Excel spreadsheet that shows each of
Speaker 1: the technology tasks when the technologists said it was going
Speaker 1: to be complete, and the current status and everything that's
Speaker 1: like that's late. You make sure that this the cell
Speaker 1: color is red, a bright red, and then you take
Speaker 1: that image and you send that to the boss with
Speaker 1: all of the technologists see seed. I guarantee you that
Speaker 1: project will get right on time. I think our most
Speaker 1: organized listeners are really into this advice. Yes, and maybe
Speaker 1: some are slightly frightened. You are less organized, but it's
Speaker 1: good to hear all the same. Chris white thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining us today. It's been a real
Speaker 1: education and pleasure. Oh thank you my pleasure as well.
Speaker 1: And good luck with your meetings everyone. Chris white Man
Speaker 1: with a plan. That guy's got it all worked out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's clearly working for him. Like I said, I really
Speaker 1: do think that it probably stresses some people out. Not
Speaker 1: sure that I would want to be in a meeting
Speaker 1: with him. I feel like I would constantly feel like
Speaker 1: I was in trouble or something for his projects. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's he has found ways to make meetings work for him.
Speaker 1: They are specific, particularly, I think, to his industry and
Speaker 1: the culture and his industry. It may not always apply
Speaker 1: to every place that you work, but as we've been
Speaker 1: sitting here talking about how terrible meetings are and how
Speaker 1: we can try to fix them, I mean there are
Speaker 1: some good things about meetings. We do like meetings, or
Speaker 1: at least some of them. Yeah, I do like meetings.
Speaker 1: They break up my day in a way that I
Speaker 1: think helps me think of ideas in a different way,
Speaker 1: which in our industry seems important. Sure, I don't oftentimes
Speaker 1: see people in meetings that I might not otherwise see
Speaker 1: on a fairly regular basis. So from a social standpoint,
Speaker 1: it's great. That's some part of work. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: making connections. But yeah, I think the best meetings I have,
Speaker 1: Like you mentioned, you liked our meetings, and I think
Speaker 1: that's because we have a really specific purpose and it's
Speaker 1: fairly small group of about four people usually, and we're
Speaker 1: really trying to get something done. It's it's not like
Speaker 1: a meeting for the sake of having a meeting, which
Speaker 1: I think a lot of meetings are, and if a
Speaker 1: meeting is related to a task. In this case, our
Speaker 1: meetings are very close to the task in hand, which
Speaker 1: is let's make another episode, as opposed to sort of
Speaker 1: the more really strategy based meetings. We're not sitting around
Speaker 1: like what kind of podcast should game plan be if
Speaker 1: I sustain and what words would you associate. I also
Speaker 1: think not having them on a regular basis is kind
Speaker 1: of good. There's a lot of meetings where it's like
Speaker 1: we need to have a weekly nine am and we
Speaker 1: are kind of like, oh, no, we should probably meet.
Speaker 1: It's more at yeah, yeah, it's more tailored to the
Speaker 1: needs of the podcast. I also think meetings have become
Speaker 1: better because of the rise of programs like Slack and
Speaker 1: hip chat, where a lot of the conversations that we
Speaker 1: don't like our happening and all those performative things also
Speaker 1: happened there. You have to ask yourself the question if
Speaker 1: you're ever thinking about having a meeting, you know, is
Speaker 1: anything here that I can do in the meeting? Can
Speaker 1: I put that into an email or a Slack conversation
Speaker 1: or some other format? Is it is a meeting the
Speaker 1: necessary thing? The meeting should actually be sort of the
Speaker 1: last resort. Yeah, I'll take a meeting with you. All right,
Speaker 1: we can meet. Let's do it. And now half baked
Speaker 1: takes half fake takes. Half bake takes are partially formed ideas.
Speaker 1: Becca and I have that discuss over the air here
Speaker 1: at this podcast, Becca, why don't you start with your
Speaker 1: health back takes? Well, this week we're doing meetings themed
Speaker 1: half baked takes, even though I already had one in
Speaker 1: a previous episode, have another? I have so many. So
Speaker 1: there are so many meeting types like lunch, meeting, walk
Speaker 1: and talk. One that I get pitched a lot is
Speaker 1: the desk side meeting when a CEO of a company
Speaker 1: wants to talk to me reporter and their PR person
Speaker 1: is like, well, just like meet at your desk. It's
Speaker 1: going to be real cash total. It's a hangout, but
Speaker 1: it's a meeting. You know, we're still talking about what
Speaker 1: you can do for me. And I can do for you.
Speaker 1: But it's dusk side. I think it's a really jargon
Speaker 1: e term. Obviously, to your point, I think it connotes
Speaker 1: a less formal meeting than a conference room meeting, right,
Speaker 1: But to me, it's just hilarious to think of the
Speaker 1: CEO or really anyone coming up and having a meeting
Speaker 1: at my really messy desk in my open office, next
Speaker 1: to my coworkers who have like garbage on their desks
Speaker 1: and are like working and making phone calls or typing
Speaker 1: or doing stuff. Yeah, it's just not the place. And
Speaker 1: also I hate the term. I don't. I just see
Speaker 1: a duck side and I'm not going to take that meeting. Sorry.
Speaker 1: I'm much more interested in the pool side meeting or
Speaker 1: the beach side meeting. Yeah, you want to propose one
Speaker 1: of those to me, It's s Growbard at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: Feel free to drop me a line. My half bake take.
Speaker 1: Also meeting related, obviously, I'm sure you've all been in
Speaker 1: this meeting before. There's a white board and then there's
Speaker 1: the person leading the meeting, and it's a big strategy meeting,
Speaker 1: and they decide that what we're gonna do is we're
Speaker 1: gonna all think of words associated with the thing that
Speaker 1: we're talking about. So everybody write down a word and
Speaker 1: pass it up to the front. Just get out of
Speaker 1: that meeting. That's a terrible meeting. Nobody should ever be
Speaker 1: in that meeting. I definitely experienced this where we all
Speaker 1: had to write words on post it notes and then
Speaker 1: put them on the big glass window, and it felt
Speaker 1: very hokey. It's totally hokey. It's pulled out of some
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two management technique textbook. It doesn't work. It's
Speaker 1: a colossal waste of time, and I hate them. It's
Speaker 1: like the trust falls of meeting. That's what I was
Speaker 1: just thinking. It's totally like some new games, like hey
Speaker 1: it's cool, No, it's not cool, pretend you're sick and leave, okay,
Speaker 1: And that's been half bake takes, ha fake takes. You've
Speaker 1: been listening to game Plan, I am Sam Grobart. Feel
Speaker 1: free to hit me up on Twitter at Sam Grobart
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