Best Strategy Book: 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings

When people ask me what’s a best book on strategy for a corporate hog they might have in mind Roger Aisles: Off Camera by Zev Chafetz or the 48 Rules of Power by Robert Greene. They expect me to start digging through Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger or start pulling out Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies (Wiley Finance) by Marc Goedhart which was the “bible” when I was working in M&A.

Don’t hold your breath, boys. Instead, but this book: 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings by Sarah Cooper, former Yahoo! and Google employee. Some might try to dismiss it as humorous and an attempt at ridicule; it is far from that. I have worked alongside 12 CEOs and have attended dozens of C-Suite sessions, what Sarah Cooper writes here echoes reality.

Are executives that rotten ? No, they’re not. However rotten you’ve pictured them, they are worse. You see, those Harvard and Stanford grads they think they got a license to screw, and screw up they do.  It’s the way of the world. So the humor in this book is only as much as the fucked up reality.
My blog is about giving you an advantage over the competition. Any advantage will do it, and in meetings, you need to look important, you need to look engaged, you need to look upbeat, you need to look informed, you need to look fabulous.

We’ll list some of the “tricks” from the book. I urge you to buy the book to get them all. Furthermore, hide it from your boss. Don’t share it with your colleagues (do I really need to say this everytime, that the good stuff you don’t share ?) Let it be your pocketbook reference (the book is illustrated). You now have an advantage over your coworkers. My numbering here does not follow the original numbering.

1. Translate percentage metrics into fractions.

2. Say: “Can we take a step back here ?”

3. Repeat the last thing the engineer [in the room] said, but very, very slowly. Let me just repeat that…

4. Pace around the room

5. “Sorry, can you go back back a slide ?” Ask the presenter to go back a slide. 

From Whiteboard tactics:

6. Draw a pizza with a question mark inside it. Say each project has different pieces and we need to find out which are the big pieces and which are the small pieces.

7. Draw a triangle with question marks at each angle. Say that any great strategy has three strong cornerstones. Ask: ‘What are our cornerstones ?”

From: One-on-One Meetings:

8. When your co-worker arrives, say you’re “just wrapping something up…”

9. Suggest a “walking” meeting (the Steve Jobs thing).

10. Have a meta-conversation about the meeting after the meeting: “Was this helpful ?”

From: On-the-phone conferences:

11.  Stop the conversation so you “can pull up the data”. Once everyone has confirmed, say, “OK, we can go ahead now”.

12. When someone mentions a large number, put it in terms of a city or country. 25,000 customers ?
That’s like a village in Saskatchewan, Canada.”

From: Owning the Room:

13. Sit next to the person leading the meeting. This will give the rest of the team the perception that you’re co-leading.

14. State out the window with your back to the room, sighing deeply.

15. Interrupt someone’s update, then let him finish (The Kanye)

16. As the meeting is ending, ask a few people to hand back. It makes the rest of the group wonder what you’ll be discussing, why they weren’t invited.They”ll assume it’s something big, even though you’re just seeing if maybe we should have doughnuts next time.

From: Nailing the Big Pitch:

17. Start with a shocking fact: I never knew my father…

18. Say you really want this to be interactive: Please interrupt me with thoughts and questions anytime…

19. Skip over several slides. (get slides from other presentations and put them between the slides you made. Then skip them. Say: Oh, we can skip this for now. We’ll come back to it if we have the time.

20. Sitting on the edge of the conference table will make you seem more informal…without taking away your air of superiority.

20. Make analogies that are so simple it sounds deep: “We have the cake, but the cake needs sprinkles. What are the sprinkles ?”

21. Say how you think the CEO would respond. “This sounds like something Melissa would really love…”

22. When someone asks what you do, use words like “proprietary” and “technology” and exciting.

From Networking Events:

23. Introduce people as if they should already know each other.: “I can’t believe you don’t know Devin !”

24. When someone asks what you’re working on, say it’s pretty condidential. You can’t say anything more without having them sign a nondisclosure agreement.

Source: 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings: How to Get By Without Even Trying

Sarah Cooper writes at the The Cooper Review