Monday, November 10, 2008

Let's discuss this in the meeting

I've previously discussed a bit around the long-winded meetings that is a reality in (at least some companies) in corporate Japan. But to be honest, I've just gotten kinda hardened to them and since they've become a part of my everyday work life, they just don't annoy me as much anymore since I have accepted them as a part of my reality.

However, today's meeting stunned even me. The first part of the meeting was fine, a standard corporate meeting, but then a highly important issue for the coming year was brought up and some discussion erupted regarding the feasibility of us succeeding in doing what we've committed ourselves to do. This issue was discussed for about an hour, at which point someone brought up that a meeting should be held to discuss this issue and make sure that we're all onboard with the plan.

Then the meeting turned into a meeting about this meeting with such important issues as when to have it, whom to include, whether we needed to have one or more meetings and then the dates and participant dicussion all over again, back and forth. We spent the better half of an hour in a meeting to decide on a meeting...

As the meeting kept dragging on and on I just can't see how we can make a decision together on an important topic when we can't even decide on when to have the meeting without spending considerable time on it...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We must be working at the same company :-(

You don't by any chance work for GSK, do you? ;-)

Anonymous said...

Has anyone considered forming a committee?

Anonymous said...

Sounds a bit like my company as well. Hard-hitting topics such as how to denote that this is the English version of a document rather than the Japanese one often, after taking up far too much time in the current meeting because the boss is an idiot incapable of making decisions on his own, end up being resumed a follow-up meeting. Sigh...

Mr. Salaryman said...

Penguin - I like how you think! You would fit right in, imagine the amount of meetings needed to form a committee and then the meetings that would follow? I could spend all days in meetings!

JT - Yeah, the worst meetings are when they dodge the important topics and end up discussing insignificant things instead...

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