The Answer To A Burning Question
Ever since Fred Brooks hatched his legendary “The Mythical Man Month” over 20 years ago, he’s been on my hero/mentor list. His latest insightful work, “The Design Of Design“, is just as good as TMMM. Of course, since my views on software engineering (if it can be called engineering) are heavily influenced by his experiences as shared through his writing, I’m totally biased and unobjective (but….. aren’t we all to some extent?).
I pre-ordered TDOD as soon as I heard about its impending release and I received it from Amazon last week. Unlike most books, which I mildly speed read, I’ve been savoring this one slowly. As expected, I’ve been discovering and extracting a treasure trove of personally valuable fieldstones from TDOD at a feverish pace.
Fred opens up one of his chapters with this brilliant quote:
“A meeting is a refuge from the dreariness of labor and the loneliness of thought.” – Bernard Baruch
I think it’s brilliant because it answers a burning question that I haven’t been able to self-answer for a long time in one short sentence:
Why do managers spend the vast majority of their time in meetings?
Thanks to Fred and Bernie, I now know why 🙂
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Enjoying and learning from this blog, one of only a handful that I subscribe to in my RSS reader. A humorous management book I am reading “Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager” by Michael Lopp, also takes a sideways look at meetings. He describes meeting purpose as either information dissemination or conflict resolution, and the attendees as either players (who have a conflict to resolve or something to gain from outcome) and pawns (who are there to mainly observe). Players are further divided into pros and cons, with cons having most to gain as they need something to change or someone to commit to something. Pros are ok with current situation and need to say or commit just enough to satisfy the cons and bring meeting to end.
Have moved on to a chapter about corporate pyramid of needs, where pitch, people and process are a pyramid from bottom to top. Convincingly demonstrates how a healthy organisation has output from 1 level ‘invading’ periodically and shaping the layer above and below.
Hi Jak,
I’m glad that my ramblings are interesting to you. Thanks for the Lopp introduction. It sounds like he and I have a common interest; trying to understand why institutional leaders behave the way they do – and how they get away with it 🙂