One of the earliest pieces of advice given me was to “volunteer to take notes of the meeting, because he who takes the notes, controls the meeting.” Not sure if that was particularly insightful, but it did teach me to hate meetings.

Today, it should be either “volunteer to run the projector, because that person controls the meeting,” or worse, “learn how to create [tag]GANT charts[/tag], because that person controls the whole freaking project.” (emphasis mine)

GANT charts—dates change, bingo, everything adjusts, man that was easy, now it is a week later, who cares?, the chart looks soooooo good.

I’m reminded of the story about a [tag]Microsoft[/tag] developer briefing [tag]Bill Gates[/tag] on a project and when Gates asked where he got that date, the developer said, “Honestly? Out of my ass.” I love it and I bet Gates did too.

[tag]Yogi Berra[/tag], baseball’s guru, said it best: [tag]“Predicting is easy as long as you don’t have to do it about the future.”[/tag]

[tags] learning to be a manager, meetings, GANT charts and how they control development[/tags]