Leadership

What's the essence of meetings, you ask? Meetings are events in which people come together and engage in a species of trial by combat called Leadership. Leadership consists of raising your voice and talking faster and faster until you drown out all the other people at the meeting also trying to do Leadership. It consists, too, of listening to people for as short a time as possible, and then only for the purpose of interrupting, raising your voice and disagreeing. There's an awful lot of self-righteousness in it. Kind of a Darwinian natural-selection thing – the mule that brays the loudest gets the oats; I'm smarter than you are, my ideas are great and yours are trash – that sort of thing. It's a bloody waste of time, for the most part – although occasionally someone tosses off a good joke and for an instant people laugh, forget about Leadership and start acting like friends; then the meeting becomes something more akin to a party. But soon someone furrows his or her brow, wipes the smile off his or her face, cranks up his or her vocal cords and starts doing Leadership again. The atmosphere darkens and the clouds close back in. That's when one not born to it starts to doze and doodle on one's notepad, and finds it necessary to stand up and move about if one doesn't wish to embarrass oneself by starting to snore. So, at a recent meeting – which had run true to form with lots of extraordinarily ripe Leadership getting done, where now all hands had begun to stir in their chairs and look at their watches and fold up their portfolios in anticipation of an end to the proceedings – one of the subcommittee chairmen suddenly quit in a final heroic, suicidal burst of Leadership. Well, talk about your sudden changes in the weather! Meeting just about over, everyone more or less satisfied with the amount of Leadership they'd inflicted or endured, and this subcommittee chairman just says, "I'm leaving." Just like that. "I'm outta here." Got up from the table and walked out the door without looking back. My goodness, but you should have seen the storm of Leadership that burst over the meeting in the wake of that little episode: it was the Tower of Babel revisited, with a vengeance and with many, many noisy efforts at Parliamentary Procedure (which is a sub-category of Leadership). Now Leadership and psychology and revisionist history and self-righteousness coalesced as if focused through a lens to a tight bright hot little spot of energy called I Told You So. That's what meetings are for; that's what Leadership is. And, if you ever find yourself wandering in some dairy farmer's meadow, mind you don't step in the Leadership.