
How Thomas Jefferson prepared for meetings - gnosis
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/03/03/thomas-jefferson-meetings/
======
aboyeji
No disrespect to Mr Jefferson but this management method does not work.

It always results in a pyrrhic victory and resentment from the other people on
the table from being made to look incompetent (although the truth is that
indeed, they are for not coming to meetings prepared).

Let me explain

My last job was President of a College Newspaper. It was a pretty cool job. I
had lots of power and I felt like I was "the one" who would usher this paper
into a web 2.0 era. I came up with this grand plan and all. Unfortunately,
much of the rest of my board was largely incompetent (or this was what I
thought). Also, running the college newspaper wasn't as much of a passion for
them as it was for me. They all had better things to do.

Ofcourse the natural resulted. Lots of meeting where we would not make quorom.
Discussions without reading the background material however earlier on we had
sent out a padded agenda etc. Naturally also, I was the most prepared for most
of the meetings. I knew our Byelaws and PnP in and out and ofcourse, I knew
the operations and management procedure for the newspaper, start to finish at
the back of my hand. I got my way at meetings a lot of the time because no one
at the table knew better and the people who knew better knew I was (mostly)
right.

Soon enough however, resentment had begun to build. I was "arrogant" and an
"asshole". We were always moving "too fast" even when it was clearly the right
management decision (often taken 2 weeks after it should have). My VP was
beginning to overrule management decisions we had discussed at meetings she
had failed to attend for one reason or the other. In short, it was chaos.

I started work in May. By October, I was insane, overworked, single and had
not spoken to my family in months. I resigned.

Long story short: If you are banking on the ignorance of your team to succeed
in a project by pushing through your agenda. You have already lost. Surround
yourself with people smarter than yourself, who will come to meetings as
prepared as you are. Watch your project, team, committee soar. Surround
yourself with morons who are too slow to keep up with you and you'll always be
lagging behind.

You can trust I took this lesson to heart when I started building my own
startup.

~~~
fingerprinter
The only way this usually works in software is to JFDI (Just Freakin' Do It).
The thing that Jefferson did is he did the _work_ , not just present the idea.
In software, the "work" is running prototype code.

Even then if you have a "vision" person, they may not be 100% sold if they
don't like the design, but know your audience a bit you can be prepared for
it.

I understand what you are saying, because very early on in my career I was one
of those people that would present ideas, even architectures and expect people
to get on board....now I realize that you have to sometimes drag them and in
software, you drag by showing them something working and how it is
possible...give them something to tweak and criticize that is real working
code, not drawings on a page.

~~~
brudgers
> _"The thing that Jefferson did is he did the _work_"_

Jefferson didn't do it alone - his team slaved away for him.

Literally.

~~~
brudgers
University of Virginia's Apology for using slave labor in the execution of
Jefferson's plan [2007/4/27].

<http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=1933>

------
sophacles
This works very well IME. There is a potential issue however, in that if you
are _too_ prepared, you become married to your vision, even when someone else
points out fatal flaws. Essentially you can lose flexibility.

This may or may not be what is desire, but I have seen projects go down in
flames because of over-prep. The goal is to find a nice balance.

~~~
alexqgb
If you know what you're doing, then you'll actually be the first to dismember
your original vision. Indeed, a principle value of this approach is that when
you do hit the inevitable need for changes, you're already well acquainted
with how all the pieces fit together. This allows you evaluate options by
considering not only their obvious pluses and minuses, but also by
anticipating the more hidden costs and benefits of any given alteration.

This (I believe) is what Eisenhower meant when he said "plans are useless, but
planning is invaluable."

~~~
mkramlich
Agreed. For example, you can intentionally leave the color of the bike shed
unspecified. So the other folks can launch into heated debate over something
they can understand and take ownership over the final decision. Meanwhile, the
overall shape and functionality of the shed gets accepted per your design,
even the very necessity of the shed may be blindly accepted.

~~~
alexqgb
A classic play. If Jefferson were involved in product design, I suspect he
would approve in full.

------
arctangent
I've used this approach before in meetings where I suspected I was going to
meet resistance to the ideas I wanted us all to form a consensus around.

I found that this approach is successful but, as sophacles says in a different
thread, it can (in theory) lead to you become somewhat blinkered to better
ideas. Since I _know_ I'm right when I go to meetings this prepared it isn't
an issue, right? ;-)

However, the main problem I found with this approach is not that it leads to
me to reach detailed conclusions without all the input I may need to do so.
I'm fortunate that a lot of people I meet with are either smart, experienced,
stubborn, or some combination of the three - the information needed to reach a
sensible consensus will often emerge.

Instead, what concerns me is the sheer amount of time it takes to do this much
preparation and the opportunity cost I have to pay while I'm busy trying to
get an "A" on one particular meeting.

There's a lot to be said for "winging it" (or, in the recent history of memes,
"doing it live"). If you're confident in your ideas and in your ability to
persuade people then over-preparing is a waste of time akin to
procrastination.

I can't guarantee that arriving for a meeting without elaborate handouts will
always lead to a better result. But in my experience I'd rather get 80% of
what I want in 3 meetings than 100% of what I want in only 1 meeting.

Disclaimer: This advice obviously doesn't apply to the once-in-a-blue-moon
meeting, e.g. meeting with a potential investor or asking your boss for a
raise. My context here is working for a large bureaucratic organisation where
meetings are a frequent and necessary evil in order to get things done.

------
munificent
One thing I've learned is how much _surface quality of presentation_ matters.
As much as we might pretend to be perfectly logical rational beings,
psychology, aesthetics, and emotion are always part of our decision-making
process. So when I present something, I try to have great material, but I also
try to make it visually appealing, clearly-written, friendly, and warm. Makes
a huge difference.

~~~
Natsu
A beautiful demo beats a working prototype, at least as far as management is
concerned.

I've actually seen this at work, where I managed to hack together a working
(but ugly) system only to experience a lot of push-back. Once I polished the
output, the same idea was welcomed.

Oddly enough, I learned this lesson back in college. In one engineering design
class, I got an A on an assignment that looked really cool, but didn't
actually work. I didn't hide the brokenness at all: I clearly documented the
fact that it produced utterly nonsensical results in my report and discussed
how I would have fixed the problem.

In retrospect, I've decided that they were teaching me an important lesson,
but I'm still not quite sure if it was intentional or not.

------
PakG1
I'm running a project right now where the main stakeholder contact wanted me
to call some meetings so we could brainstorm the use case scenarios,
functions, etc. Thing was, she didn't want to relinquish the lead creative
role for the project. So I'd be running meetings being a facilitator. The way
she explained it, I felt like I would be babysitting people unnecessarily.

Me: OK, I can do that, but I'll just send a note out to everyone to brainstorm
their ideas first, and then we can have items on the table to discuss.

Her: No, nobody has the same ideas or same vision, so we need to have a
session first to brainstorm all the ideas.

Me: Well, I find in my experience that discussions can be much more productive
if a lot of the thinking has been done beforehand. How about I'll just get
everyone to think of a few items to suggest/discuss before we meet, and then
our discussion will be able to really get into it?

Her: No, that's a waste of time. You'll be duplicating work. Besides, people
won't know what to write beforehand. They need someone there who can help pull
the ideas out of each person. Everyone already has the ideas, it just needs to
be pulled out.

Me: Judging from my conversations with everyone else so far, I think this team
is quite capable and intelligent. I really do believe we'll be more productive
if everyone contributes some ideas beforehand so we can assemble an agenda of
sorts. This won't restrict us from brainstorming new ideas either.

Her: No, they need someone there to guide their discussion and help them to
articulate what it is they're thinking.

Me: That may be the case with many people, but that's really not the sense I'm
getting from these folks. To be frank, I think it may even be insulting to
think they need that kind of help.

Her: I'm not going to argue about this anymore. We can agree to disagree. Just
organize the meetings.

Me (in my head): You're just too lazy to do your own work to figure out what
you want, even though you claim to already know what you want.

End of story, there was no way getting around it. This was escalated to senior
management, and while senior management agreed with my perspective, they told
me to essentially take just care of her. So I scheduled the weekly meetings.
The very first meeting, as I tried to lead the discussion, one of the senior
customer folks involved suggested that they take away this discussion and come
up with some documents and lists, and they'll come back to me when they're
ready. I thanked God that competent people still existed.

~~~
danssig
You're very patient. After the second idiotic "no, it's a waste of time" I
would have just said "ah ok, as you wish" and then did it how I wanted. Why
bother trying to educate people who don't want to be smarter?

------
plainOldText
The HN title somewhat implies that Jefferson showed up to all the meetings
this way; overly prepared. But the title of the original article states
"Thomas Jefferson and preparing for meetings" which clearly does not convey
that Jefferson was always like this. Furthermore in the article it is narrated
one instance when Thomas Jefferson showed up prepared, which does not
constitute enough evidence to support that Jefferson was this guy that wanted
to be the most prepared in the room.Hence the HN title is very misleading.

Anyway, my point is not about Jefferson; my point is this: Why do people
change the wording in the HN tittles (vs original ones) so that people would
click on them? Can't we all be accurate when we transmit information to
others?

~~~
gnosis
_"The HN title somewhat implies that Jefferson showed up to all the meetings
this way; overly prepared. But the title of the original article states
"Thomas Jefferson and preparing for meetings" which clearly does not convey
that Jefferson was always like this."_

Actually, the HN title does not in fact say that Jefferson prepared for all
meetings like this. He clearly prepared for at least one meeting this way. And
I wouldn't be surprised if this was not the only occasion where he was so
prepared. But I'll grant you that perhaps using the plural of the word
"meeting" instead of the singular was a tiny bit misleading.

 _"Furthermore in the article it is narrated one instance when Thomas
Jefferson showed up prepared, which does not constitute enough evidence to
support that Jefferson was this guy that wanted to be the most prepared in the
room. Hence the HN title is very misleading."_

Actually, the _title_ doesn't say anything like _"Jefferson was this guy that
wanted to be the most prepared in the room"_. The _article_ may have implied
that (with good reason, I think), but not the title.

So to call the title "very misleading" because we can't know what was going on
in Jefferson's mind is a bit harsh, in my (admittedly biased) opinion.

 _"Why do people change the wording in the HN tittles (vs original ones) so
that people would click on them?"_

The fact is that the stories submitted to HN have to compete with other
stories. Many, many other stories. Personally, I find every story I submit to
HN interesting, and think they would be found interesting by other readers on
HN as well, if they'd actually take the time to read them. But if people don't
click on them, they obviously won't read them, and not even know what they
missed.

Usually, that means the titles have to be attractive, punchy, and interesting
to grab readers' attentions, no matter how interesting the contents of the
article may be. That's just a fact.

Another fact is that otherwise interesting authors sometimes suck at giving
their posts or articles good titles.

Here's a case in point:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2143752>

The original title was _"Understanding Syntactic Macros"_ , while my
submission had the title _"How Lisp macros differ from static code-generation
and metaprogramming"_ (a title I got verbatim from the body of the article,
which I felt was a better and more interesting description of what the article
was about).

My submission got a lot of upvotes; and, consequently, was probably read by a
lot of people. Do I think it would have gotten the same amount of attention if
I'd used the original title? Not for a second. The original title might have
been technically correct, but not very interesting at all.

So I do occasionally change the titles of my submissions to improve the odds
of the article being read (while remaining faithful to the author's intent),
or to make the title more clearly reflect what the article is about. I think
of what I do as a positive service to the HN community, and am not ashamed of
it in the least, since when it works and the stars are right, people will
actually read the article and be pleased by what they read. Then everybody
wins.

