Am I the only one pissed off because I just watched the culmination of a process whereby
some share of my tax dollars were completely wasted.
- Wasted --> Whatever costs were incurred to prepare for the meeting. Staff, facilities/infrastructure, phone calls, emails, etc....all that time and effort, thus their costs for naught.
- Wasted --> Whatever it cost to have the POTUS, VPOTUS, and Congressional Minority Leaders all in a room and getting nowhere.
Maybe it's only I who's pissed. I retired from a 30+ year-long career in management consulting whereby I and my project teams provided professional services mostly to C-level and EVP-level managers of Fortune 500 (or similar outside the US) firms and government units. The meetings I attended for the bulk of that career included several of the client's principals, the project partner I oversaw, and the project senior manager whom the project partner oversaw. My teams routinely, because that's the way implementation projects happen, held meetings with their client counterparts as well as internal meetings. One simply cannot have unproductive meetings; there's no time for that and no client wants to pay for them (nor is it right to bill them for them).
Though our public servants aren't exactly billing on a T&M schedule as I and my staff did, they are subject to the same constraints: each of us has only so much time in a day, and ineffective meetings do not make good use of that time. Thus when government officials waste resources having unproductive meetings, resources we taxpayers entrusted them to efficiently use, they're spending money wastefully just as do private sector unproductive meetings. There is a key difference however: a client can refuse to pay for an unproductive meeting, where the government's clients, you and I, cannot; whatever resources the gov't wastes, we cannot ever recover.
