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Your Guide to What Trump’s Second Season Means Washington, Business and World
Exit to Ireland. That’s how comedian Jordan Klepper mentioned the early departure of the US president from this week’s G7 Summit. It is sometimes called the French exit. When in France, Filer Anglaise explains that he leaves the party early without making a fuss or saying goodbye.
It seems polite not to attract the host’s attention to the fact that people are leaving, so it has always been my preferred option at social gatherings. But this is not a party, but Donald Trump, a gathering of world leaders, who has given excuses to reporters, saying, “We need to come back as soon as possible.”
His excuse? Middle East revision. Which question asks, what will the G7 be without organizing the global crisis? He then doubled at a raucous exit and swiped through the true social of Emmanuel Macron’s social media platform.
Some have suggested that his reason for resignation is his nuisance to the French president, and that he wants to miss talks with Ukrainian President Voldimir Zelensky. Others who were dragged into the meeting. British officials told FT that Trump “can be “impatient about working on doing something productive.” Or was he just enough?
“M-exit” is a strategy recommended by Trump’s former fellow partner Elon Musk. In 2018, Musk emailed Tesla employees with productivity tips.
Psychologist and author of the amazing conference science: Stephen Rogelberg: The way to lead a team to a peak of performance says that when someone shows up late, it creates bad feelings. However, he is more optimistic about leaving early, suggesting that while it may be considered uncivil, it is also constructive for the organization.
It also depends on who is doing it, he says. “In general, studies on narcissistic leaders have consistently found that they generally do not care or evaluate others’ needs unless they privilege their needs over others’ interests because of their desire for domination and advance their personal self-centered agenda.” Leaving early does not always represent such behavior, he adds.
Perhaps Trump has been serving everyone. Next week’s three-day NATO meeting was cut to two and a half hours of sessions to avoid the same happening again.
There is especially joy in leaving a useless meeting early. Many of us didn’t check out the Zoom meeting even though we were still logged on, is that strange? New Microsoft data shows that the fastest growing online gatherings have more than 65 participants, an increase of 35% across multiple times over the past four years. To address this, the number of participants held after 8pm at least has increased by 16% the previous year.
As Derek Thompson wrote in Atlantic Magazine last year, “Today, knowledge work is not about creating new things, quantitatively speaking, than talking about those things.” There are fewer topics hotter than meetings. This year, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon sparked a lot of debate when he told staff to “kill the meeting.”
A lot of politics is involved in the conference. One friend has an arrangement with a colleague and must not leave the room in 20 minutes, and they will have to be interrupted by an emergency call. Much of her meetings looked like power plays by the Machiavelli boss. The Machiavelli boss packed the day with something meaningless, just to deliberately exclude it from the most important. Sometimes it turns out that the worse thing to do than attending a meeting is not attending a meeting.
emma.jacobs@ft.com
