Meetings, Bloody Meetings

John Cleese is reading up for a work meeting the next morning. As his unsatisfied wife falls asleep, so does he, to dream he is in court being charged with running terrible meetings.

It's a quite lively industrial film that covers the common mistakes in running meetings that makes them such a useless trial for organizations, covering sloppy planning, poor communications, and worse organization of the meetings. It's very well done and very amusing for an industrial film. It's hardly surprising that it is, because it's written by Cleese and Anthony Jay, who would later go on to produce and write YES, MINISTER about the inability of ministers to control their subordinates.

There's a bit of sadness in this because it suggests that trials are well organized. I've served on three juries, and can attest to their being very wasteful of the jurors' time, what with badly offered evidence, cases being settled after the jury is picked, and the jury sitting around while lawyers wrangle in sidebars.