The meeting before the meeting

The real decisions never happen in the meeting. They happen before it. In the hallway. On Slack. In the one-on-one you had yesterday.

If you walk into a meeting hoping to persuade people, you've already lost. Persuasion happens in private, in small doses, over time. The meeting is just where the group ratifies what the key people have already decided.

This isn't cynical. It's how humans work. People don't change their minds in front of an audience. They change their minds when someone they trust explains something clearly, with no pressure, when they have time to think about it.

The best marketers I know spend most of their time on the meeting before the meeting. Building alignment one conversation at a time. By the time they present the strategy, it's already approved. The presentation is a formality.

If your ideas keep dying in meetings, the problem isn't the idea. It's that you showed up expecting the meeting to do the work that should have been done before you walked in the room.