Be the smartest person at your next meeting

alfadriver wrote: Then books started to be written. And it became a common degree- go into engineering THEN an MBA- to get the highest salary. Those people drive me nuts.

Glad to oblige!

I had never heard the "let's look at this from 30000 feet" line of bullpuckey before reading it in this thread at 10 this morning on break. Immediately after break I go into a training meeting (I should add, I am a machinist and meetings are not my milieu). The instructor gets through four or five slides before losing all self confidence and starts mumbling about taking a break, after which we can recap where we are and get a thirty thousand view on things.

For those with more experience in the world of meetings, how inappropriate is a wet snort? Should I have gone all in and doubled over laughing instead?

Most of the meetings I have are actually productive, but we don't have too many meetings in general. We simply don't have time to have unproductive meetings. We have a team workload meeting once a week (assignment of workstreams), meetings with the customer once a week and a maintenance/change meeting once a week. Each one is a hour, sometimes a bit more if the project load is huge.

One thing we can't dodge is mandatory training for HIPPA, corporate and security and social media. Luckily, we only have to complete those twice a year.

Swank Force One wrote: I've read that Project Managers make good money. Every Project Manager i've work with has been so stupid i'm surprised they can talk and breathe at the same time. I could do their job twice as well while expending half the effort i make at my current position. I should look into this.

Then you've never had - or needed - a good PM. They're essential to, well, managing projects. My wife is a PM for little stuff like $20M airport construction jobs, jobs where there are serious repercussions to not doing a perfect job or getting it done on time. Trust me, it's not as easy as you might think. Especially when dealing with little strutting roosters who think they know everything. You should hear what she has to say about engineers with book knowledge but no actual industry experience...

The larger the organization you work for, the more specialized each department is and the more people there are whose cooperation you need to get anything substantial done. When each group already has its own duties and priorities and timelines, there's a real art to getting everyone on board to help you make your initiative successful.

I'll reiterate what I said earlier in this thread, the article's tips to 'appear smarter in meetings' aren't merely about 'impressing your coworkers' -- they are social engineering tricks to build your credibility so that your listeners are more likely to do what you're asking of them. It's not the buzzwords that are important, it's the results.

Keith Tanner wrote:

Swank Force One wrote: I've read that Project Managers make good money. Every Project Manager i've work with has been so stupid i'm surprised they can talk and breathe at the same time. I could do their job twice as well while expending half the effort i make at my current position. I should look into this.

Then you've never had - or needed - a good PM. They're essential to, well, managing projects. My wife is a PM for little stuff like $20M airport construction jobs, jobs where there are serious repercussions to not doing a perfect job or getting it done on time. Trust me, it's not as easy as you might think. Especially when dealing with little strutting roosters who think they know everything. You should hear what she has to say about engineers with book knowledge but no actual industry experience...

Sorry, i didn't mean to cast a light on ALL PMs, i can see how a good one would be useful, because within my own company, inter-department communication is horrid on a good day, which REALLY screws up ongoing projects/recoveries.

I'm just saying i know the ones i work with make 2x+ what i do, and they suck in a huge way at their job. Half the time i end up doing a chunk of it anyways.

Reading this thread makes me so glad I'm a mechanic...

Stuff like this would likely get your ass kicked or simply ridiculed mercilessly until you stop or find another job.

In reply to Keith Tanner:

That's an actual project. They need to be managed. This nonsense is starting to take hold here where people have gotten business degrees from matchbook cover schools and need to show off what they've learned. We are probably a few weeks away from assigning people to manage tasks like getting the copier paper refilled and emptying pencil sharpeners.

We are in the process of "restructuring buses as business" which seems to mean transporting people is an afterthought as long as we meet seemingly arbitrary productivity goals created by people who clearly have never waited for a bus to pick them up.

In a training class for our new tracking system they wanted us to focus on getting everything on schedule rather than making sure there was regular service. The theory is that the customers may be upset and inconvenienced when buses pass them by but our on time performance will improve greatly.

There seems to be more Project Managers assigned to "manage" routine internal business processes now. Whereas, if the company had a viable process to begin with (order processing and fulfillment for standard products, for example) they wouldn't need a redundant person to ensure that the process was followed. Project Managers are absolutely necessary for non-standard product orders and large external projects as Keith and Wally said. Good Project Managers were essential for projects like that in the company I was with. And buffoons were not tolerated.

If they're just managing internal business processes, they're just managers. But Project Manager sounds cooler, doesn't it?

I did some (real) project management back when I worked in software. Enough that I can talk intelligently with Janel about what she does. It's a pretty critical job for real projects. The problems come when you have managers with nothing to manage, then they just start being a pest. Kinda like the deer in Michigan, you need to cull the herd occasionally.

I have very little patience for meetings, you can ask my current coworkers

With enough management everything eventually becomes a project.

Here is my take on project managers:

The good ones hold people to tasks and deadlines without being micro-managers. My thought is that if I provide you regular updates via email and get my work done on time, the Project Manager should pretty much leave me alone and let me do my work. Additionally, none of them tried to pretend they knew things they didn't, and took the time to learn from the groups why certain things might have been more important than others that may not have been obvious to somebody who wasn't an expert in the field. This is especially important because my company runs a "pool" of PMs who run projects for all of the IT departments.

One of the ones i'm working with right now has been working with me on an issue since... July. At least twice as week, they need to be reminded that i don't work in IT so i cannot answer any questions that you would ask an IT person. Ergo: Don't ask me where the berkeley the feeds are housed, the destination folders, the file mapping, what time they're sent, how often they're sent, or berkeleying ANYTHING about it. BECAUSE SINCE JULY, I AM STILL A CLAIMS PROCESSOR.

I actually used the "30,000 feet" line in a meeting I was leading a month ago for the giggles and no one got it. They were all looking at me seriously and nodding their heads; EXCEPT my boss who was sitting in the back laughing hysterically. Nice to work for someone who understands your personality....

Wait- you work at (insert military branch here) headquarters too?

Swank Force One wrote:

Gary wrote: It's fun and amusing to read, but in reality, at least in good companies, nothing lasts forever. Eventually the non-performing poseurs are discovered and weeded out. Saw it many times. But there's always a new buffoon to replace the old buffoon. I'll say again, I'm glad I'm retired.

Couldn't disagree with you more. Corporate America is soul-crushing. I could post DAILY stories that would make you cry, but i'm afraid that it would bite me in the ass eventually, because even though i berkeleying hate this job and all the morons that surround me, i need a paycheck.

My antidote to the bad meeting... I don't know where I got this, but have used it twice in my life, and it really makes for a good laugh. For me at least. And I haven't been fired yet for it. As the level of oxygen in the room begins to diminish, start shaking your head and looking at the ceiling- not so much that all the attention is on you, but enough that one or two might notice it (if you've got some eye drops, feel free to use them when you're looking at the ceiling). Then, apropo of nothing (except the physically painful droning of whomever is bloviating about this or that), loudly state: "BOOOORRRRING!" Look a few people in the eye, get up, and walk out of the meeting.

I couldn't stop laughing about it for two days. I got a couple "ballsiest move I ever saw" and "thank you, for the love of all things holy, thank you".