Take it however you wish but the fact is that the word committee means two different things -- and the connection between them is tantalizing. First, of course, the committee is that part of a larger number that meets to determine directions to commit to; unfortunately, the committee is also the person committed to an asylum.

And maybe too much of one leads to the other. I know people who are never out of meetings and their cry is often, "I don't have time to get everything done!" Now to me that says that whatever is happening in those meetings is not very job productive, at least to those who find them not solving their job problems.

So how many meetings are really needed? How many people actually allow the meeting to work? How many meetings do you go to where you leave with something resolved the way you expected or wanted?

There are company meetings where information is passed down to the complete population; and they can be good at giving data, particularly good-news/bad-news mixtures, which might be misinterpreted if passed around the water coolers, or which you are going to see something about in the financial pages of your local paper. And there are department meetings where everybody gets the opportunity to be updated on what everybody else has (or should have) been doing. But what about those meetings where things are being decided?

After working for a lot of people over the years I have to tell you what most of you probably already know, that top-down communications are alive and well across corporate America. Strangely enough the worst offenders are those managers who continually talk "consensus" but where in fact consensus with their way of thinking is the only way they are going to let things go. When individuals want yes-people around them like this there may well be a corporate decision about direction but there is no enthusiasm for that decision. No enthusiasm generally means failure.

I remember working for a company where the founder/owner had just sold out to a large defense contractor as its only manufacturing company. (That was already a recipe for disaster given the Washington, DC thinking of the principals.) The founder had a theory about his operation which he was proud to expound on: "My company moved like a large wheel. Everybody reported to me creating spokes that were strong and numerous." And indeed every bit of paper that was to go anywhere went across his desk: quotes, letters, delivery data, forecasting, manufacturing scheduling, personnel files, everything. He certainly left us with a heritage of a very large number of spokes on a wheel that had absolutely no communication between peers -- a wheel with no rim. It took a while to get the staff out of their corporate reporting mentality into a risk-taking, productive unit.

Or the president who solemnly told the company that "everybody should have an opinion, but I do have a problem if it doesn't agree with mine." Or the company chairman who consulted an astrologer for every major decision across the board: products, dates of introduction, pricing, even new hires. (That maybe was balanced by the fact that he appointed a senior clergyman to the board "to keep the company morally sound.") And I could point you to companies today that are doing all sorts of weird things. One, for example, is introducing a product quite alien to anything else the company has done, with no engineering infrastructure for characterization, no sales structure, and zero enthusiasm from the staff. But the product is the president's baby so there is no-one left to kill it. Of course, it will fail.

Or the company that has put its sales force on a quite high salary for the rest of the year -- with no commissions -- because sales are down and the company wants to protect them. Does it honestly think that those salespeople are going to do anything in the way of work for the next six months? And if you were them wouldn't you be sandbagging orders for January 2001?

Or maybe you work for one of those companies where an opinion that is contrary to management means that you will be severely abused in front of your peers at what is supposed to be a positive meeting? Or do you work for that company where any idea for a product immediately outside of what you are working on today is squished on impact. Or how about that company that re-organizes so frequently that the managers don't make any decisions -- because they might make a mistake and be caught up in the next shuffle.

If you recognize any of these places, congratulations, you are a survivor. Allow others to end up being committed in your stead.

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