The Meeting Ninja

The dogs were kinda hard without a throwing weapon...

Last night I had a teleconference with a bunch of people from head office to discuss one issue that affects one of the products I'm looking after. Late night teleconferences are not unusual as Japan often gets handed the short end of the stick when several continents are involved and it's notoriously hard to get people from other departments in the Japanese subsidiary to participate as they usually just shovel it unto us in business development and blame us if the laundry lists of topics we get handed doesn't have time to get covered.

However, in the meeting last night I managed to convince one of the regulatory team that he really should be in the meeting as regulatory issues would be the main topic and it would be best for everyone if he was in the meeting. He seemed to reluctantly agree that he probably should call in.

Come 11PM and I call in to the meeting and not to my big surprise I don't hear his name and assumed that my hope that he would actually call in was futile. In any case, the meeting goes reasonably well and close without any big misunderstandings or issue. I'm not particularly annoyed that he didn't call in as that would have been a huge paradigm shift in attitude to late night meetings, but a little disappointed as I felt that I had almost convinced him.

Then to my big surprise, this morning as I had just come in to the office and gotten started on my first of countless cups of coffee, the regulatory guy calls me up and says "So Salaryman, I was in that meeting yesterday and I think it was really good that you asked me to participate. I just want to compare some notes with you on what went down". Cue me almost choking on the coffee as I had done all the talking from the Japan side with no clue at all whatsoever that he actually had been in on the call. "Wait, what? You were in the meeting the whole time? Why didn't you say anything?!" I managed to squeeze out in surprise. "Well, I thought you were taking care of things and I don't feel so comfortable in speaking English, so I just listened in" he blurts out like it's the most natural thing in the world.

I think this kind of meeting participating needs a category of its own and I think that "Meeting Ninja" would be a good label to put on this. Being a meeting Ninja means that you join the meeting undetected and slip out without anyone realizing that you were there in the first place... This is probably a lot harder to do in video conferences or face to face meetings though...