Art of misusing company resources – 1. Call urgent meeting

The Boss should call a meeting of his team, that is, of people who report to him.

The meeting needs to be designated as urgent so that people who need to attend have no choice but to drop whatever they are doing and rush for the meeting. This will permit the effort they had already put into the task to be wasted, requiring the task to be restarted from scratch.

Care should be taken that the subject of the meeting not be specified. This will create intrigue and interest and get people, who may have skipped the meeting if the subject did not pertain to them, to attend in the belief that something of importance for their area may also be discussed. Otherwise, some may have skipped the meeting and spent the time doing work.

The call for the meeting should be given at a time when a significant number of the intended participants are expected to be engaged in meetings with their own teams. This will create a powerful multiplier effect as many other meetings involving many other people will be disrupted.

Care should be taken that the Boss does not invite peers and seniors to participate. The Boss’ successful conduct of these meetings is likely to spark jealousy amongst peers leading to a campaign of misinformation against him.

In the meeting, the Boss could either sing the company song in chorus, announce the introduction of a new vendor in the cafeteria, give a sneak preview of the new policy on cars to be only parked backed-up in the office compound, or any other important and urgent matter, puff out his chest, and say that the CEO wanted that information to be personally disseminated by him to his team and that he would like each of the participants to “go forth” and do the same with their teams within the next two hours. He should then thank them for their participation and close the meeting.