A council at which indigenous peoples of southern Africa meet to discuss some important questions.
Meetings were the great penalty of my corporate youth. Time I could have spent working instead passed in board rooms where I scored as much free coffee and sandwiches as one could reasonably procure without attracting stares.
My attitude toward meetings may be all the proof I need that I did not belong in corporate. I did enjoy my time there for as long as situations were new to me. Inevitably patterns started to repeat and corporate constipation stirred nothing.
I am, I say with no self-flattery whatsoever, a creative person. Creative thinkers do not belong in corporate, or in many other places in life. In most situations creative thinkers are a pain in the ass.
I tend to agree (though not completely) with Frank Zappa when he said that creative people should look to government and public service for their careers, not the arts. "Go where you’re needed" was (paraphrased) Zappa’s philosophy.
I remember the first meetings I ever attended, though, and I remember being impressed. For several months after college I was an admin who scheduled meetings for others, but I never attended the meetings (except to grab those fine sandwiches).
The meetings brought together various disciplines, with someone from Inventory Control addressing people from Marketing to explain to them and to Advertising that a product campaign would fail because there was not enough of a certain type of promotional packaging available. I may be simplifying the discussions which I listened to, but it surprised me to see that these meetings I scheduled actually had value. Even before I attended meetings I guess I was skeptical of their merit.
What was the first meeting I ever attended? Who can say? I guess school would qualify. In Kindergarten, as at the Indaba, we met to discuss some important matters, commencing a pattern that has repeated throughout life.
