Mark Landin writes and Terry Simpkins agrees: > ".......a good first topic for the MR would be to give them a > quick list of all the things from last year that we as a group are > still waiting to hear about ...." In the world of corporate business, everyone works for someone else. Even if you are the CEO of the corporation, you're still responsible to the shareholders. A common thread in the corporate structure is the concept of an "annual review" or some other periodic time when the manager and the employee get together to discuss the employee's accomplishments, set goals for the coming year, and review whether the goals from the last meeting have been met or not. I propose that the name of the "Management Roundtable" be changed to "The HP Management Annual Review". In some very real ways, the people who come to the Management Roundtable work for their customers. It is ultimately those customers who determine whether they will succeed or fail. Recent years have seen amazing changes in the openness and "customer focus" of CSY. These days HP makes few decisions without consulting with at least specific customers and in many cases with the HP3000 community as a whole. The Management Roundtable however has remained, I believe, a fairly painful and unsatisfying event from the points of view of both the customers and the managers from HP. A suggestion is that the HP managers consider approaching the meeting the same way that they approach their own annual performance review with their own manager. If I were to go into my own annual review having failed to follow through on many of the promises and action items that were developed during the previous review, I would expect the review to be an unpleasant experience, and I think that's kind of what has been happening at some of the Management Roundtables. G.