Meetings Can (Will) Crush Your Soul

February 7, 2022

Good morning! Are you enjoying anything about the Olympics? I find myself riveted to the color commentary associated with the curling competition — Canada vs. the U.S. These athletes are geniuses (not just the curlers, but all of them).If you are a fan of Howard Gardner (Multiple Intelligences/ Frames of Mind, 1983) you are familiar with bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. I, for example, don’t have much of it at all, indiscernible. Others have lots of it, some have way more than their share, a very few are bodily-kinesthetic geniuses…and these are those you watch on television — in the 99th percentile.

• Finally watched Cohen’s Macbeth; put it on your must list.
• A client sent me his professional / personal development reading list from the last two years — with 47 titles; impressive.

• “Be bold and be right.  If you’re not bold, you’re not going to do much of anything.  If you’re not right, you’re not going to be here.”  (Nadella)

• Super Bowl Recipe
• An homage to that iconic Los Angeles building — Capitol Records Tacos
• I first saw this building and marveled at it from the window of a chartered school bus back in 1973 before The City of Angels constructed any of its other skyscrapers.
• You don’t have to be rooting for the home team, but make these 13-layer tacos as a way of bringing downtown tinseltown into your living room.
• This will serve six or seven hungry people, or countless others who aren’t hungry.
  • Cream together equal parts cream cheese and sour cream, maybe 2 cups each.
    • Add and blend in 1/2 cup herbs and spices to your liking, such as cumin, garlic, cayenne, diced jalapeno, salt, pepper — or store bought taco seasoning.
    • Spread this blended mixture smoothly and evenly on a large platter to a one-quarter inch thickness
  • Add twelve more layers (for a total of 13, get it?), one at a time, to your liking, such as:
  • Cooked ground boeuf (or turkey or tofu or chinkin or pork butt, vegan or whatever floats your boat — or stacks your albums)
  • Chopped fresh tomato (lots)
  • Chopped black olives (lots)
  • Black beans — or beans by any other color — or heck, even refried beans if you want — but if so, schmeer them immediately on top of the first layer
  • Roasted red peppers, chopped — or, if you prefer keep them fresh and crisp
  • Diced sweet onions
  • Shredded cheddar cheese (cheddah is bettah — and shred your own from a fresh block)
  • Thinly sliced iceberg lettuce, but not so thin it loses its turgidity (again, slice your own, nothing in a bag — please)
  • Guacamole — homemade, of course with plenty of fresh garlic, lime, and salt
  • Sliced Scallions — yes, they’re different, very different, from sweet onions
  • Chopped cilantro — and use those succulent stems
  • Wedges of fresh limes on the side
  • Tortilla chips on the side to scoop, chomp, crunch, munch, and enjoy
  • The idea, obvi, is to get some of all 13 layers onto each chip and then chomp
  • You will find yourself making an entire second batch at halftime
• Do you suffer from any of this — or did you, have you?
  • “There’s a masochistic pride in overworking.  How heavy a workload can I truly handle?  How many plates can I keep in the air?”  (Wang)

Meetings Can Crush Your Soul

• “Meetings can crush your soul.”  (Chugh)
  • “My personal experience — and the prevailing wisdom of management and psychology research — is that meetings default to patterns like these:
  • Whoever speaks first is likely to set the direction of the conversation.
  • The higher-power, more extroverted, majority-demographic people are more likely to take up disproportionate airtime, receive credit, be given the benefit of the doubt, and interrupt others.
  • The larger the group, the less meaningful the conversation — and the less likely we are to break out into more meaningful, smaller group discussions because doing so is time- and space- consuming in the physical world.
  • Key information is less likely to be shared when it is already known by others; lesser-known but important information tends to not be shared broadly.
  • Whatever we did in the last meeting, we are likely to do again in the next meeting.
  • The result is predictable:  A sub-optimal, sub-inclusive meeting.”  (Chugh, Ibid.)
    • (More on this really good stuff coming next week.)
• “Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub.  It is the center hole that makes it useful.”  (Tzu)
• “One after another, books were thrown onto the funeral pyre… (they) were incinerated by Nazi students as zealous onlookers cheered.”  (Evans)