They said that???

Scott Hannah, TMMBA Student

Do you feel like your team meetings are going nowhere?  Too much discussion, and too little progress.  It’s much like that in the real world too.

Here is a list of meeting quotes compiled by Peter J. Weertman, head of Boeing’s Commercial Aviation Services:

Top Meeting Quotes for 2009

Are we balancing by numbers or egos?

In the worst case scenario, you end up in a Mad Max world where all you need is a pointy stick and a water filter.

We’re paralyzed, so the process is working.

I appreciate the opportunity to brief these awful charts.

Subtracting adds to our performance.

It’s easier to develop a new process than to hold an old one accountable.

I feel like I’m the key on the end of Benjamin Franklin’s kite.

This presentation is a lot like the grieving process.

They are not encumbered by facts.

Over-promise and under-deliver—that was the old plan.

Are we going to have a PowerPoint war?

Risks have a tendency to get together and talk to each other.

It will be a little clearer and a little more complicated later.

Marketing can calculate things we don’t allow engineers to do.

Directors are like icebergs—you know they’re moving, you just can’t tell.

Facts will never stop me.

You have to add it in the budget so you can take it out.

We want to make the livestock comfortable as they fly to their imminent demise.

We’ve had more than one centralized location.

If she went any farther away, she’d be closer.

I’m practicing so I can say that with a straight face.

Let’s deal with factual data.

This system is better because we don’t have to make up as many numbers.

We’re having a technical meeting on his feelings.

The depths of our leadership competencies know no bounds—at least lower bounds.

No sense in shooting off ammunition when you don’t know whom you want to kill.

When you look around the table and can’t find the sucker…the sucker is you.

There’s been change, but nothing’s different.

Do we have a Help Not Needed chart?

It wasn’t ever really a schedule; it was more tracking what had happened.

It’s really just takes looking good in a suit without drooling.

We are way too busy to look at the risks.

Overviewistic.

The altars are flipping so fast I don’t know which idol is up.

Feels like we’re being pecked to death by a duck.

I get requests every day; sometimes a lot of them, sometimes none.

Dismay seemed optimistic.

No turn unstoned.

Sometimes I’m in my best form when I’m ignorant.

It includes an appropriate amount of inaccuracy.

We are fat, dumb, and happy with a parasitic layer on top.

This slow death is killing me.

The numbers haven’t changed but everyone’s opinion of them has.

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More than a few of these feel like familiar comments.  Lessons that class 10 can take from these are; work at building your teams early on, communicate with your team members, and be prepared prior to meeting on a project.  If you’re not prepared to discuss the project at hand, you’re taking precious study time away from yourself and your teammates.