Wednesday March 2, 2005
>Meetings…
I woke up one morning recently dreading the day ahead.
I had appointments for a meeting at 9:30 a.m. Another at 1:00 p.m. Another immediately following that one. And a fourth at 6:30 that night.
And I found myself wondering, “Is this what I retired for?”
Corporate executives might consider four meetings an easy day. Cabinet ministers reading briefing notes as they rush from meeting to meeting might welcome such a day. But it is not my idea of heaven.
Omar Khayyam thought heaven consisted of leisure and luxury:
beside me singing in the wilderness…
All the wrong reasons
I tolerate meetings better than I once did. I used to consider all meetings a waste of time, a way of avoiding actually doing the work that the meeting was intended to facilitate. Today, I\’m more inclined to see meetings as their own justification – a primitive form of mass communication through which participants slowly evolve a collective vision. The work achieved – eventually – will differ from the work that would have been done had those meetings never happened.
I resent meetings. But I go to them. Not because I expect to accomplish anything there. And certainly not because meetings attract me.
Egotistically, I go because I kid myself that the other members might need me.
More personally, I go because I don\’t want to let friends and colleagues down.
It\’s the loss of personal autonomy that irritates me most, I think. A meeting expects me, even requires me, to attend. At a predetermined time and place. Whether it happens to be convenient or not.
I\’ve been to meetings that no one wanted to attend. Every one of us had more important things to do. But we didn\’t feel we could disappoint the others. So we went.
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A few months before his death, I called my friend Peter Honor. “He\’s watching a soccer game on TV with Andrew because he thinks Andrew wants to watch it with him,” his wife Carolynn told me.
“I didn\’t think Andrew was a soccer fan,” I said.
“He\’s not,” she replied. “He\’s watching soccer because he thinks Peter wants him to watch it with him.”
As Sir Walter Scott wrote (though not about meetings) “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive…”
Most people think that quotation came from Shakespeare. They should spend less time in meetings and more in research.
Meetings are a modern curse. Long ago, only kings and prelates had the power to call people together. Otherwise, people met on the job. On the road. Or in the pub. Casual encounters flowered into consensus. Business got done. And people got on with life.
Today, anyone can call a meeting. Anytime. I\’m not sure that\’s progress.
I skipped my last meeting that day. Instead, I stayed home and wrote this column.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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