Someone Else Will Do It

Yeah, right.

“The meeting is the work”.

That was the nugget of wisdom I shared with my better half, who had just concluded another zoom call full of jargon, idea jostling and corporate posturing that easily bled over the allocated 30 minute run time.

In her defense, she was simply trying to rationally analyze a problem.

“What do we accomplish in meetings? I could have used that time more productively to actually get something done.”

But then again, corporate bloat requires meetings.

Here’s how it actually works: the entire structure rewards people who can sit in a room and have takes. That means spitball, weigh in, “what if we,” push back, add their voice - while the actual making happens somewhere below them, by people whose names they may not even know.

And listen, I get it. Try building a company from scratch and micromanaging every aspect of it. The odds of a premature heart attack skyrocket.

Yet it does not make the issue any less annoying.

A close friend once told me (via someone else): “If you want something done, go ask a busy person.”

That was the eternal conundrum I existed in. On one hand, I was the person with the big title who actually knew how to structurally build and operate what I ran.

If Josie the social admin called out sick, I can go create an asset, make sure all the metadata is sound, and get the post up at the right time. If James the paid media buyer had to take off to attend his kid’s preschool graduation, I can hop into Google Ads and launch the campaign - fancy targeting, optimized CPV.

But I’m also a tinkerer. Ever since I was a kid I loved learning and understanding the how’s and the why’s. One of my favorite things to read was one of those 1,000-entry “did you know X was because of Y” encyclopedias that dominated my bookshelf, right next to my comics and choose-your-own-adventure paperbacks.

Old habits die hard, even when you’ve earned the right to be Captain Delegator.

But in my current state, as I work tirelessly to shed the identity of a corporate shill that I had to adopt to earn passage into more management responsibilities, one of the most triggering events is whenever I still work adjacently with people who live in the world of maybes, what-if’s, and circle-backs.

You know those types. They live for meetings.

The control freak types have to own the calendar invites.

Others nudge to be added to meetings for visibility.

Like I said to my better half: the meeting is the work.

The decks. The posturing. The ideas that get delegated to the elves in some nondescript workshop below them.

But there are forces and tools evolving that are quickly rendering these bureaucrats obsolete. And believe me, these people are afraid. Just look at the intensity of the idea spitballing. The frequency of the backstabbing and gatekeeping.

And oh yes, the volume of meetings.

That’s one of 100 reasons why the corporate exit, ironically, was the only way I could survive.

Use the time to build what’s mine - or be a spectator in the feral survival game, and worse off, be the one who has to make a half-assed, lukewarm compromise idea come to life?

Someone else will do the work?

Yeah, right. I’ll be over here building mine.