Show IT 'Alpha Males' Who's Boss at Meetings

Phil Factor's Phrenetic Phoughts on August 03, 2006

This blogger will likely strike a collective nerve with his description of IT meetings as forums for alpha males who "wrestle for control of the whiteboard or witter in a stream-of-consciousness way about anything that drifts lazily into their brains." One way to use this to your advantage, he points out, is to slip in a budget request after several hours of this. That way, he says, the money "will be voted through with a minimum of fuss, in favor of completing the agenda and getting out to lunch." For less craven types who want meetings to move a little more efficiently, he offers a list of nine rules for improvement. Among them: No meeting should ever take more than an hour, and its length must be determined and published beforehand. Nobody should be allowed to speak for more than three minutes at a time. The meeting should have an itemized agenda.