10 Tricks To Appear Smart In Meetings
With Sarah Cooper, author of “100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings”, Founder of thecooperreview.com Corporate Defector Drops Out To Follow Her Dreams Sarah Cooper is a former Google employee turned comedienne and author. She writes hilarious...
Summary
With Sarah Cooper, author of “100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings”, Founder of thecooperreview.comCorporate Defector Drops Out To Follow Her DreamsSarah Cooper is a former Google employee turned comedienne and author. She writes hilarious business satire on her website The Cooper Review online and has recently published her first book 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings. Steve asks Sarah to talk about her decision to leave Google to pursue an uncertain dream of becoming a comic writer. She remembers a quote that affected her which said that if you haven't done something you want to do by the time you're 40, you probably won't do it. As someone approaching her 40s, this “scared the hell out of her,” crystallizing the idea that she shouldn't put her dreams off indefinitely, even as everyone around her thought she was throwing away a golden opportunity to work at one of the best companies in the world. The decision was hard because she liked her job and appreciated the benefits and safety that went along with it and also because she couldn't convince her husband, family, and friends that it was a good, and on some level, a necessary move. In the end, she decided it would be riskier to her happiness and future to stick with her cozy Google career than it would be to start over as an unknown writer.10 Tricks To Appear Smart At MeetingsKnowing this little bit of background, it's clear from even a passing glance at The Cooper Review that Sarah has mined a lot of source material on the modern workplace from her time at Google and other jobs. The motto of The Cooper Review is “funny because it's true.” Her work skewers—in a light-hearted way— corporate cultures based on endless meetings and reliance on jargon and a certain amount of posturing and bluffing to impress one's peers and bosses. Her piece entitled “10 Tricks to Appear Smart at Meetings” is a good and very funny example of her style and target selection. The inspiration for this post comes from her observations of the absurd things people in meetings say and do to make it seem like they know what they are talking about even though they've barely been paying attention at all. The first item in this list is drawing a Venn Diagram. Seemingly out of nowhere, someone volunteers to make a quick presentation of an idea using a Venn Diagram. What Sarah noticed was a Venn Diagram Effect where other meeting attendees suddenly came to life and started making suggestions about the size of the circles, colors and labels used any time a Venn Diagram was thrown up on a whiteboard, even when it made little sense or added nothing to the conversation. Her advice: draw some kind of Venn Diagram, note a burst of chiming in from colleagues, then “slink back to your chair and continue playing Candy Crush”. This one came from a personal experience where a colleague drew a blatantly terrible Venn Diagram and instead of getting clowned by others in the meeting, everyone reacted as if he had done something very smart.The second tongue-in-cheek recommendation is to fool people into thinking you're a quick study by pointlessly converting percentages into fractions. When someone mentions a statistic (“33% of users liked feature X”) retort with a deadpan “so you're saying that 1 in 3 users likes the feature.” Apparently, this passes for a display of sharp math skills in certain interactions. Of course, it's just another kind of smokescreen for the would-be sneaky converter's lack of engagement and inability to add anything of value.Suggestion #3 is to encourage everyone to “take a step back.” This one comes in handy when you realize your co-workers are throwing out ideas and comments and you don't have any of your own to contribute. Stopping the meeting with this invitation to “take a step back”,
First published
04/05/2017
Genres
Duration
12 minutes
Parent Podcast
The Steve Pomeranz Show
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