Spent four and a half hours in four different town hall meetings.  These are quarterly management and leadership meetings where the senior levels take the time to tell the rest of us how we're doing and what's expected of us.  Two more of these are scheduled, one on Friday and another next week.  The later they are, the lower level of management involved.  

I can sum these meetings in a few words. 

• Rah, rah, rah.
• We're doing well.
• We need to do better.
• You can grow your sales portfolio both organically and with new products.  
• Get more face time with your clients.  
• It's been hard and it's going to be harder.
• You need to work harder.

They used to exhort us to work smarter, not harder.  Is this a new pivot in schemes to surrender using our smarts to advance and instead fall back on our sweat?

The theme was sort of the same as people who claim they like both kinds of music - country, and western.  These meetings were about both kinds of concerns, sales, and marketing.

Ninety percent of the time was spent talking about sales and marketing, or just sales.  Of two hundred and seventy minutes, less than twenty-seven applied to me, as I'm not in sales or marketing and don't see any customers.  Of the ten percent devoted to other matters, they addressed thanks to product engineering, the leadership team's background, personnel changes in the leadership team, and thanks to the previous leadership team.  They also mentioned an acquisition or two.  

My wife entered during one of the calls and heard a brief portion.  She later volunteered, "That one person talking said a sentence that made no sense at all, it was just buzz words strung together."

The time wasn't wasted as I worked on emails and spreadsheets, trying to figure out the problems sent to me, develop solutions, and help the people reaching out to me.