Sometimes, Silence is Golden: A Rant

November 21st, 2008 | Published in i hate meetings

Meetings are often held in conference rooms

Image via Wikipedia

I work with a major corporation on their intranet, building out pieces they need and helping to keep the information updated. Today, I found myself, once again, in a meeting where people were trying to decide what to put on a new page they’d had me build. Now, first of all I’m a bit biased when I say the meeting was a general waste of time. I HATE meetings. They’re sometimes necessary, but not usually. And this company LOVES meetings. Not sure what to have for lunch? Let’s call a meeting! (I exaggerate, but not by much.)

However, today’s meeting was especially silly. I’d been asked to put up an intranet page, but they had no real clue what they wanted on it. Then, we had to have a whole meeting, disrupting 5 peoples’ work process, in order to figure out what to say on this page. It reminds me of people who demand the government do something to alleviate their problem, but really have no idea what they want. What generally happens is they end up disliking the solution because it wasn’t well thought out. Many times, it wasn’t even necessary.

I’m an advocate of saying what you mean in your business and saying it passionately. I don’t like wimpy corporate-speak or watered down sales pitches. Tell me what you want and a good reason why I should care. If you are saying something simply because you think you should say something, usually you’re wrong. Sometimes, silence is golden.

A Startup Guy