The 15 Laws of Meeting Power
Venkatesh Rao,
ribbonfarm.com,
Oct 19, 2009
This article - via Seb Paquet by way of Daniel Lemire is interesting to me mostly because it's a nice summary of the tactics I've seen people in board meetings use (usually against me) to stifle democracy and use power instead of reason to get their way. Lemire reduces his tactics to four more basic rules. But you know, my feeling is, if you need to employ some sort of power tactic to get your way, you've already lost. Yes, power wins, and you can get the meeting - and even the organization - to go along with you. But these are all people who would have gone along with you anyways. What you haven't done is to sway the one person who really needs to be swayed: your putative opponent. I know this sounds idealistic, but I've seen this in practise (I've been in a lot of meetings over the years): meetings and organizations can survive the bad decisions - what they cannot survive is the factionalism and alienation that follows a power play.
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