I feel like those scientists are overlooking the purpose of meetings: the boss wants to feel powerful.
I wish he would talk less. The meetings would be half as long.
I tell my staff that if they won’t talk on calls then I will. They have the power to shut me the hell up but rarely take it.
Engineers, in case you couldn’t guess.
Businesses should be studied by anthropologists. I find most business behavior is better explained by asking what emotional needs it is meeting for the people in charge. It’s really frustrating reading people who pretend the role of business is to make as much money as efficiently as possible, because that is absolutely not at all how it works. There are factions and feather-nesting and curry-favoring and consolidating power bases and a whole host of sociopolitical shennaingans constantly going on, especially as corporations grow.
But guess what? Businesses aren’t going to pay an anthropologist to embed. No, they’ll pay psychologists to come up with a bunch of science they will follow if it suits them and ignore if it doesn’t.
In fact, I’d say one of the real problems oligopolies face is that allows them a large margin to be bad at business, meaning asskissers and social climbers have an enormous edge over people with product or content knowledge. This is a pretty commonly accepted phenomenon among royal courts through history, but we like to pretend businesses are rational creatures.
curry-favoring
I’m sorry, I can’t sit here and let this go by. It’s “favor currying”, or “currying favor”, with the latter being the common expression. Curry favoring is what I do at Thai restaurants.
I read it as curry flavoring, no wonder why I’m now hungry
Thanks. Once I reversed the order, I couldn’t remember if it was curry being favored or favor being curried.
Well, both really.
And lets introduce curry flavoring into the mix.
Hast thou ne’er curry savored?
It doesn’t mean nepotism in the south Asian community? (no offense intended)
Not exactly what you want, but David Graeber has your back there. Less related but see also.
Your link goes to the end of the Graeber piece, I had to scroll way up to find the start. But wow, what a start.
I would like this book to be an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization. There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state of affairs. I wish it to end.
Oh shit you’re right. Fixed. Also yeah Graeber is wild like that. If you’re up for a longer read you should read his Debt: the First 5000 Years.
Royal courts at least had jesters.
Though there was an interesting book I read years and years ago about corporate jesters.
I know someone who used to work for a major beer manufacturer and they had a corporate magician on staff lol
Most businessmen I know are absolute fucking clowns, so that checks out.
Getting a business degree is simply the socially acceptable version of the underwater basket weaving trope that people complain about. It’s only practical in the sense that people don’t scorn it in the same way they do other niche topics. I would trust the intelligence of someone with a degree in medieval shoe making over a suit with an MBA.
I’ve said this before that MBAs teach people to make the worst decisions possible in any given situation. The critique of the frozen businessmen from Adventure Time is pretty spot on.
My name’s not Science.
Who’s gonna tell him?
Science says
These headlines are all so gross. Pure clickbait.
No accreditation to the university or research group, much less the individual researchers. No hint of data analysis as stocastic field. A weird dogmatization of Science as a concept.
Might as well read it as “God says”, given the way the information is presented.
organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, who coauthored a review of over three decades of meeting science in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.
One of a half dozen individual contributors and team members cited. RTFA.
RTFA
If the headline and subtag are this shit, I’m not bullish on what comes next
Do you expect full citation and regalia to be in the headline and the subtag?
I expect better, more explicit headlines rather than clickbait word salad
Please, be specific. Right now it’s a bait commentary.
Sorry, that’s not really how headlines work
