Meetings - good times for Bullshit Bingo

Want to boost the economy? Ban all meetings | Marina Hyde | Comment is free | The Guardian: "Indeed, I'm told by some that the higher up you get in the world of meetings, the more stage-managed they are. Decisions aren't made there: they're just ratified. The old "information sharing" justification is apparently cobblers too, because if you have to wait till the meeting to get the information, then you're really not relevant enough to be at the meeting.

What the vast majority of meetings do is confer status on those blowhards "leading" them, or attendees who really should find other ways to validate themselves. Even Cobra – the snazzy-sounding Whitehall crisis response meeting – is widely griped about, with Scotland Yard's formerly most senior anti-terrorism officer complaining it was "cumbersome and bureaucratic", full of people "jockeying for position", and slowed everything down.

But on people go. Gazillions of meetings are held every day, with every one presumably regarded as an indispensable step toward something worth attaining. What would winning the game of meetings even look like? I suppose you'd battle up all the levels, and finally ascend to the ultimate meeting: one to which you'd actually want to go to. Maybe you'd get in on the Meeting of Meetings, which would be something like that meeting where Obama and Hillary and the joint chiefs watched Osama bin Laden's compound being stormed live. But was that really a meeting?In the photos it looked so passive as to be more like a movie night.

As a last word on meetings, I keep thinking of that radical Dutch urban planner who did away with all traffic lights in various towns, and found road safety dramatically improved. If only, instead of making fatuous interventions on some footballer's disciplinary breach Cameron did something similarly useful with his time. Imagine if he could announce that for one week – in fact, make it a month – all meetings in all workplaces in all Britain were to be banned. People would simply have to muddle through, reclaiming the civilised mores of a time before the answer to everything was to have a meeting. Who knows, a meetingless Britain might even prove that holy of holies for George Osborne – the entirely free initiative that would significantly boost the economy."

'via Blog this'