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How Chat and Youth Are Killing the Meeting

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the good-riddance-i-say dept.

dominique_cimafranca writes "Forbes columnist Dan Woods describes a change in the way some companies handle meetings. Owing to instant messaging and younger tech-savvy CEOs, meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week. Woods proposes ways to make this 'meetingless' management effective."

2 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. No kidding... by IANAAC · · Score: 4, Interesting
    When I was still working in IT, the last contract job I had, I had a micro-manager from hell. He'd never held any sort of management job before, but technically was brilliant.

    He needed to be in constant contact with me throughout the entire day.

    I had gone down to the server room for about 45 minutes, and came back to this IM:

    "ANSWER ME!!!! YOU MUST ANSWER ME! I AM YOUR MANAGER AND NEED TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!" I'm not kidding. It was that obnoxious.

    Never mind the fact that we all carried around cellphones and he could have easily called me if he so desperately needed to talk to me.

    It turned out that, as usual, all he wanted was a "status update" on an install I was doing. Honestly, this was more of a quite common tech-to-management role switch problem, but the fact that he had IM at his disposal just made workdays damn near unbearable.

  2. Re:Bravo, Bravissimo by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've seen meetings go on for a solid day because no manager in the place would man up and take charge ore responsibility. everything kept going around and around, it's what jaded me against MBA's and how worthless they are.

    I have wasted 8 hours in a meeting over a data protocol that I finally gave up and said," I'll write the damned spec, Hell I came up with a working prototype over the last 4 hours and it's already installed on the test server. Want to take a look?"

    I was afterward talked to about stepping out of my bounds and embarrassing a couple of managers. I shrugged, and said, "if they would do their jobs, I would not have to do it for them"

    I am so glad I don't work at a large corporation anymore...

    P.S.: they used my spec, After a manager tweaked it by flipping two data fields and claiming it as his own.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.