10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings
medium.com
medium.com
>3. Encourage everyone to “take a step back”
This one is the best cause it is so damn effective at getting everyone to pay attention to you without you having to say anything of substance.
>8. Ask the presenter to go back a slide
Because clearly the presenter doesn't know enough to give you the most pertinent information on their own slides.
Actually this is often the case. Most people who have never worked in management consulting are terrible at building presentations.
10 Tricks to be "that" person in meetings
It embarrasses me when we have techs from other companies doing training or demos and management starts spouting this bullshit.
The problem with this statement is that you're assuming everybody's as smart at spotting bullshitters and manipulators as you. What if only 20% of people in the room noticed what they were doing and the other 80% thought they were a genius?
This is often the case and it's why strictly rational people are playing an irrationally weak hand.
To paraphrase a recent experience of my own, a manager calling a meeting with the dev team "we need to re-arrange the javascript in our headers" "step back a bit, what problem are we trying to solve?" "pages need to load faster, rearranging headers makes pages load faster" "step back a bit, why do they need to load faster? Why is javascript the problem?" "Clients have complained about graphs not loading" checks the server logs, sees internal server errors causing pages to crash (those which don't crash on the server side are loading instantly), goes to fix the actual problem
some of these are genuinely useful and smart things,
in very specific contexts