Oh, well said. It's harder though: the people who "do things" generally avoid meetings when possible, precisely because they want to get things done. So identifying them may be impossible, because you may never even see them.

In my weekly schedule, I have one day blocked off "no meetings". It's amazing how many people say "but it's just a one-time thing", "it won't take long". I regret only that there is no way to block off two days, or even three. Many people confuse talking about doing with the doing itself.

I stopped getting invited to meetings when I made a comment about a suggestion the boss made.

I guess "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard" is the wrong response if you like meetings.

But I don't so it was like a blessing that I didn't even know about.

When I hired my assistant, I told her that her job is to tell me I suck: that a particular piece of my writing sucks, that it's not funny, that something is confusing, dumb, whatever. This allows me to make my writing funnier, better, un-dumb, etc., before I publish it.

I don't take criticism from just anyone -- especially on my writing; only people whose minds and literary judgment I respect. It's a small circle.

But, welcoming criticism means that you will ultimately be better.

A recent example: My friend Kate Coe rewrote a few lines of my back cover copy for my book and told me to shorten my bio. She was right. I replaced my words with hers. They were better. And then I chopped most of my bio. It's better now. A short bio makes you sound like you don't have a lot to prove.

Margaret Thatcher- " The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

"But, welcoming criticism means that you will ultimately be better."

Yes. One of the few things I miss about work at the university is the free editing advice. I could always find someone willing to make helpful suggestions, and I learned a lot by doing the same for others.

Now, after retirement, some of us still trade editing by e-mail, but less often than before.

The thing I definitely do *not* miss is attending meetings. Meetings at the department level were awful. College of Arts and Sciences-level meetings were worse. University-wide meetings were almost unbearable. For the last 10 years of my 35-year career, I avoided appointment to any committee outside my department.

"What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?"

Ummmm....getting a working constitution for 13 former colonies who could hardly stand each other?

"To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects-- blah blah blah"

Margaret Thatcher was/is a Brit, and the British approach to forming a society larger than a tribal kingdom was steam-roller crushing of subject peoples. She had no idea and no hope of ever understanding any other way. That's what they had done for 900 years by the time she came along. Obviously here she could not understand that forming a functioning union might itself be the guiding principle that would dominate over every other.

She got a lot of things right, and she built a lot more consensus that she confesses to here. Here she is bullshitting.

I consider it an act of friendship to tell your friend when he or she is being an idiot/self-defeating/counterproductive.

This subject has been much on my mind lately.

I'm a web developer by profession, and work for a fairly large and successful website. At least half of the employees, IMO, provide no benefit to the company. But they sure do talk a lot! Ultimately they just make everything harder. Strange coincidence, they all have either business or law degrees - who'da thunk it?

I've started a side project with some friends to build a project management tool, and very quickly we've put together a better product than anything I've ever produced in 12 years at various big companies. Why? There aren't any empty suits to deal with.

If you multiply my experience, which I think is typical, across all of the big companies in all the land, well, I think we have an opportunity to make huge efficiency gains :-)

Fire all the empty suits!

Good luck with that Todd. There's a huge concentration of them in the HR departments!

Mark Burnett, probably the most successful TV producer of the decade, is said to ignore any email longer than two or three sentences.

And speaking of workplace foolishness, we should give some credit to the ninnies at NOW. I agree with every word of this except for one:

"Recent developments in the David Letterman extortion controversy have raised serious issues about the abuse of power leading to an inappropriate, if not hostile, workplace environment for women and employees," NOW said in Tuesday's statement.

Men such as Letterman make decisions on hiring and firing, who gets raises, who advances and who does entry-level tasks, NOW said.

"As 'the boss,' he is responsible for setting the tone for his entire workplace -- and he did that with sex. In any work environment, this places all employees -- including employees who happen to be women -- in an awkward, confusing and demoralizing situation," the group said.

"The National Organization for Women calls on CBS to recognize that Letterman's behavior creates a toxic environment and to take action immediately to rectify this situation. With just two women on CBS' board of directors, we're not holding our breath."

Not bad! The only word I object to is "toxic", a term of simpleminded jargon. Also, their quotation marks around "the boss" are highly suspect.

link for the preceding.

Crid, you're right.

Women have so little personal agency, they need to be protected by their Big Sisters whenever confronted by that evil, overpowering male sexuality.

One wonders if we would hear the same drum-beats if a then-unmarried female celebrity was revealed to have (Oh, God!) had sex with a male staff member (no puns intended!)

Suuuuuuuure we would ... .

JayR: Well, now don't go implying that NOW speaks for all women...they certainly don't for me!

Second, I don't know that Letterman is going to be hurt by this in the long run. Obviously his most recent ratings boost is a result of people wanting to know the juicy details and therefore tuning in, but, with the short attention span of our society, we'll be back to business as usual in no time. (Personally, I've always thought Letterman was a skeez, so I'm not surprised by any of his revelations)

Since we're on the whole power/sex thing, it's also interesting to note that we've been hearing ALOT in the news lately about female teachers (older, in position of authority) carrying on with their male students. Not sure what that's all about...teaching (primary and secondary at least) is one area that's always been heavily dominated by females, which makes one wonder, has this hanky-panky always been going on or is it just that now we are hearing about it....?

Maybe Letterman doesn't deserve harsh corporate censure for what was happening in his playpen, but it is at least odious. Some will consider him humiliated, and he's earned that.

It's been a long time since I cared, but in the 1980's I loved that guy. His detachment from the usual machinery seemed admirable, if not heroic. Someone once said Letterman's power came from 'never having taken the oath of showbiz'... Where every guest in a skirt is a sexpot and anyone who writes a book is an intellectual and anyone who strums a guitar is Elvis. People would come on there and get brutally mocked when they crossed the line, no matter how much higher they were on the Hollywood food chain than Letterman.

And then someone I respect would show up... A Beatle or a Francis Ford Coppola, and they'd get all the warmth and courtesy a boomer could offer.

Without watching the show since 1990, I've retained enough interest over the years to know that he married late in life after a long romance and had a son many would think was his grandchild... And still I don't care if he fucks bimbos on the side. If he wanted to go out and bang 22-year bar sluts in Queens, or pay for the kind of Manhattan hookers that only a success of his magnitude can afford, I'd still have no problem with it.

But to select tail from his subordinate staff in his own shop? That's not only lazy; it has incestuous, Jim Jones/Charles Manson overtones of personality cult.

He deserves to be mocked, even by the lesser souls of NOW.

Letterman can unleash his "evil, overpowering male sexuality" on whatever consenting adult he pleases -- but not if they're depending on him for a paycheck.

Even if NOW came out and said that female bosses had the right to any male intern in the room, that wouldn't make Letterman's actions right. It would just make NOW really, really wrong.

Todd Fletcher: Good luck with your project. At the same time, do be aware of this: as a technical person, you can put together the world's best product, but even good products do not sell themselves. That's where the suits come in.

"But to select tail from his subordinate staff in his own shop? That's not only lazy; it has incestuous, Jim Jones/Charles Manson overtones of personality cult."

Ya, and it also gives a whole new creepy factor to his "jokes" about Palin's daughters.

I resent his collapse, or descent, or senescence, or whatever it is we're watching. Letterman was always accused of being mean-spirited or plain smartass, charges from which I often defended him... My favorite people are bright and pugilistic. To make the jokes he used to make required courage and sincerity as well as talent, and television rarely brought us people with those qualities.

I used to think an argument could be made that he was TV's finest practitioner. The small-mindedness of his work (dropping melons from great heights on the the sidewalk, making fun of starlets) seemed only like a recognition of the essential cheapness of everything on TV, as well as the guileless pleasure which viewers could take from it... Just be real, man, that's all we ask. And now as television itself is in death throes, there's not much reason to be precious about him.

But this stuff (and yes, it's particularly ironic in view of his stumbling with the Palin family) suggests some sort of buzzing insect who muddied all the exits from his own hive. He couldn't find anything to hump that wasn't part of his own family, and couldn't see how annoying his buzzing had become to outsiders, even the ones who used to like the honey.

(Now, is that too flowery/pompous, or is it cool? I really did like the guy, but he's been wicked famous for thirty years, though not prone to great misconduct heretofore: Yet big money seems always to isolate people eventually.

...Not that I wouldn't mind giving wealthy isolation a try....)

(Always dug Maggie Thatcher, too: Smart & pugilistic.)

Why, yes, I did mean to say that I'd like to try being rich, and thanks for asking. It's getting late, and all that floppy logic got confusing.

Two of my favorite tweeters? Lisanti & Cosh. Letterman didn't invent sarcastic wit, but it's hard to believe these two guys would be playing so freely if Letterman hadn't spent the 80's moving the fences back.

(Or Kaus. Or any number of other columnists....)

And speaking of workplace foolishness, we should give some credit to the ninnies at NOW. I agree with every word of this except for one:

"Recent developments in the David Letterman extortion controversy have raised serious issues about the abuse of power leading to an inappropriate, if not hostile, workplace environment for women and employees," NOW said in Tuesday's statement.

Men such as Letterman make decisions on hiring and firing, who gets raises, who advances and who does entry-level tasks, NOW said.

"As 'the boss,' he is responsible for setting the tone for his entire workplace -- and he did that with sex. In any work environment, this places all employees -- including employees who happen to be women -- in an awkward, confusing and demoralizing situation," the group said.

"The National Organization for Women calls on CBS to recognize that Letterman's behavior creates a toxic environment and to take action immediately to rectify this situation. With just two women on CBS' board of directors, we're not holding our breath."
=========================================

Actually this whole thing is horseshit! She slept with him because he is a celebrity. Even after she stopped working for him, and went to work for the guy she is living with, she took a trip with letterman to Letterman's Montana ranch.
That's why the guy got pissed and tried to blackmail letterman.

Come on. Lets be serious at least 50% (conservative estimate) of women in this country will sleep with a celebrity because of who he is.