I heard this at a training session and love it. This is about how you should handle very senior meetings or encounters.

When you’re presenting/in a meeting/talking with someone who is significantly senior to you, this is the right strategy.

Too often I see people try to fill up the whole hour. They fill their presentation with lots of data. They leave the conclusion to the end. They hang around even though the topic is completed.  They can seem like the wallflower wanting the attention of the football captain.

Without fail, my best presentations to senior people have been the ones which accomplish the objective of the meeting in the shortest time possible. In one meeting, I hadn’t even gotten past the first page before the senior person flipped through the entire deck and said “I agree. Anything you need from me?” At first I was dismayed: “Wait! I spent hours on this deck! I want to go through it!”  But then my boss said to me afterwards, “Great job. Usually she takes the whole hour going through the presentation line by line.”  I prefer the drive by.

Senior folks are smart and they don’t have time. The faster you’re in and out, the better.