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Corporate Talk

Recently, I had the opportunity to be part of an interview selection process for a scholarship, in which I was grouped together with a bunch of other scholarship applicants and the group was given a topic to work. At the same time, a couple of the the HR people closely watched us with a rather big scoresheet in their hands, attempting to evaluate the performance of every member in the team, picking out each person's strength and weakness.

And the subsequent discussion went pretty much as I expected. Everyone wanted to make their voice heard and ideas and opinions were thrown from all directions. And some of the ideas were undoubtedly brilliant, but some were not and when they were followed up with a one minute justification, it was a pure waste of limited time.

The biggest problem though was that this form of disorganised brainstorming lacked focus on the end goal and went on till somebody said '5 minutes left'. I realised that people tended to forget that quite a bit of time was needed to connect the ideas together and make sure it made a coherent presentation. This tended to be usually done at the very last minute, which negated some of the great ideas that were brought up.

I guess this is a direct consequence of the pressure cooker in which the participants find themselves in, when people talk faster than they think, when people talk for the sake of talking. Not a desirable culture but one well suited to our deadline world.

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