A Successful Meeting

I have had considerable experience with meetings in my life and, as far as I'm concerned, if I never attend another one, it will be too soon. I worked with a guy at the paper mill who used to work for P.&G. until he quit and formed his own consulting company,  and made more money as an independent contractor doing the same work for the same company. He told me that P.& G. defines a successful meeting as one in which everybody walks away feeling good afterwards. I don't think that P.&G. has a monopoly on that concept because I've seen it elsewhere, and now I'm reading about it in this book. They must teach this in management school or something.

The only exception I can think of is when I was in the army. When we had a meeting there, the purpose was to plan something and, if the operation didn't go according to plan, we heard about it afterwards. This after the fact meeting was called a "critique". We would be congratulated on the things we had done right, and criticized for the things we had done wrong. It wasn't about placing blame, it was about determining why something hadn't worked and how we might do better next time. I suppose they did try to make us feel good coming out of most meetings, but that was secondary to the accomplishment of the activity for which the meeting had been called in the first place. I think that's a better way to judge the success of a meeting.

I remember one meeting I had with one of the kids on my school bus, his father, his school principal, and my boss. At the end, the principal made the comment that it had been a good meeting. I said, "The only way we will know whether or not this was a good meeting is if Anthony's behavior on the bus improves. If it doesn't, then this meeting will have been a waste of time." Nobody said anything, but they all looked at me funny, as if they had never heard anything like this before in their lives.

I don't know when the Chicago schools were integrated, but I remember my mother telling me about the busing some time after I had moved to Cheboygan. She said that there was a big traffic jam when the busses pulled up to the school, which I can believe because those schools were not designed for buses, or even cars for that matter. Gage Park had a small parking lot out back, but Sawyer didn't even have that. The teachers had to park in the street, but not right in front of the school because that's where the parents dropped off and picked up their kids. This must have made them popular with the neighbors who subsequently couldn't park in front of their own homes. Any school that's designed for cars and buses has two large lots or circle drives, one in front and one in back. One approach is reserved for the buses, the other is designated for the parents' cars and the parking lot is located so as not to interfere with either one.

I used to fish in Marquette Park, but I never did any good there. At some point my buddy Jack talked me into trying Sherman Park, which is not far from Tilden High School. I was nervous about going into such a "questionable" neighborhood, but Jack said that he used to live around there, and it wasn't that bad. We always went fishing early in the morning anyway, and seldom encountered any other people. I remember seeing a bum sleeping on a park bench once, all covered up with newspaper, but he didn't bother us and we didn't bother him. Sherman Park was smaller than Marquette Park, but the fishing was much better. When you went to Tilden, did you find the neighborhood "questionable"?

I know that Tilden was integrated, but that's because it was a specialized school that drew kids from several different neighborhoods. The book mentions that some of the Chicago schools were integrated, but not on purpose, they just reflected the composition  of the neighborhoods in which they were located. I always thought that the concept of neighborhood schools made sense, but that was before I found out that some schools were over crowded while others were under utilized. That doesn't make any sense at all, unless the intent was to maintain racial segregation. I can see Mayor Daley's dilemma though. No matter what he did, he was going to have half the city pissed off at him. Maybe that's why he depended so much on the cemetery vote to keep him in office. Were the cemeteries also segregated?