Pet Peeve : Love those meetings!

Next time you hear your boss saying he has just too many meetings to attend volunteer some help. Tell him that you would attend some of those meetings on his behalf. What?!! Don't you have enough meetings to attend already? Then why invite trouble by volunteering to attend some of your boss's too? Sounds ludicrous. Does it?

In the software engineering side of the IT industry I am part of, every kind of task other than pure engineering types is considered a overhead. Attending meetings? Stupid, such a waste of time. I am sure the situation in other industries will be no different. Some people seem to have taken a wow to not talk about meetings without taking the "stupid" word!

We all know the standard 'S' curved product life cycle. Have you ever stopped to think what makes the graph develop into an 'S' shape? What are those points that are joined to form the chart? Different phases of a project, did someone say? Okay, then, what is the mechanism that is working behind the scenes and deciding on the phase of the project and hence turn of the graph? Meetings, I would hasten to add.

You are an engineer and until last week you were heavily involved in experimenting a product concept and building a demo. Beside working on the POC itself you had a number of meetings to attend to sell your feasibility study. Then the focus shifted to the core team. You heard today that it was time to build the full fledged product. In all probability you were not involved in the core team meeting. Should you feel happy that someone sympathised with you by not insisting you to attend another of those stupid meetings? I would say no. Because, the S curve finished charting the 'C' portion without your participation. As the project progresses further you might have even fewer meetings to attend. Bad. Bad for you.

Let's face it, it is in meetings where key decisions happen. The 'S' curve for a product/project is nothing but a string of such key decision points over time plotted on a graph. How many of those meetings do you get to attend? Only a few? Bad. Many of them? Good! You grow from making decisions on engineering problems to deciding on product life cycle and business problems. The number of meetings you have to attend in a week is also a rude measure of your position in the organization. Simply put, your career grows in meetings, and through meetings. So, love those meetings. Meetings grow you; take them seriously.

Btw, heard that there is a meeting this tomorrow at 8:00 AM to decide on retiring your product and releasing the current resources. Are you invited to the party ?!