When someone asks me what I miss least about the corporate world, I can answer without a missed beat.

MEETINGS

While I can safely say that Mrs ThinkingEngineer had many more at her last job than I did, I can say that they were the bane of my existence. The worst was the “Morning Staff Meeting”,  a meeting of department heads to see what the problems and issues of the day were. There were, however, more than a few problems with this concept.

1) At 9am, most of the day’s problems and issues hadn’t sprung up yet. So, the meeting became a “What happened last night that we missed meeting”.

2) The time of the meeting dropped it right into the period that you had figured out what had broken, and were formulating and implementing plans to fix them. This brought things to a screeching halt, while you listened to other Dept heads talking about personnel issues and such.

3) There are Dept heads that actually think their meeting performance (read talking time) actually is their job performance. Unless you have had a catastrophe, you should be able to summarize in under 5 minutes.

I did, however, find a solution. A thinking engineer solution. As Engineering Manager I had many of the machine and building controls accessible from my computer, including environmental controls. When the tired A/C in the conference room went out, I had a new more efficient and LARGER system put in, with very modern controls.

And every day as I walked into the morning meeting those modern controls did their duty, and turned the conference room temp down to 40 degrees.

Problem Solved.