raison

There are meetings, and there meetings, and the one you're talking about is, well, one of those. They _ought_ to be coordination meetings, lasting about 15 minutes, to check and see if there are any interdependencies that have been identified recently. Instead, they are a platform for your boss to discourse at length about, well, anything, confuse the rest of us, and generally provide no useful information. (Why, yes, I have been in that same meeting, why do you ask?)

There are, I think, two useful kind of meetings. There's the short one, described above. They really, really need to be short. If there's that much information that needs to be exchanged, a meeting is not the best format.

The other kind is the torturous but necessary strategic meeting where various choices and plans of action are determined. I've worked in positions that required those. Those should also be fairly short, but god help us, they're usually long. I once worked with a woman whose idea of involvement was to create more branches to decision trees just as we had lopped off a branch, making for endless meetings. You couldn't decide anything because as soon as it was decided, she would present a new set of options for that same issue.

Me, I wish I could draw beasties. I usually write the alphabet in my best handwriting, in hopes of improving my penmanship. So far, it hasn't worked.