Talking one-on-one with senior leadership is crucial for building relationships, getting quality advice, and generally just making yourself known to the bigwigs. But you’re not the only one looking for face time, so how do you squeeze in a few minutes without having to lurk around the lobby hoping one of the C-suite crew will walk by?

Enter: micro meetings.

Think of these like the world’s fastest lunch & learns: everything you need to know, but on 1.5 speed.

• Each micro meeting is tailored to a specific theme or question, the more focused the better.
• For example: details on how next quarter’s strategy affects your role, insights on how industry developments are impacting the company, or even good ole career advice on how to expand your skill set.

Here are a few things to consider when setting up your first micro meeting with a top dog.

Less is more. It’s easy to RSVP “no” to an hour-long sync without an agenda. But a 15-minute chat is harder to refuse. Even CEOs have a hot minute to spare.

• So send a message pitching the micro meeting and make sure to lead with just how little time it’ll take.

Don’t make it all about you. In business and life, the most effective way to get someone to help you is to make it a win-win situation. Get their buy-in by explaining in that intro message why this micro meeting also helps them.

• When in doubt, go with something about how your improved performance thanks to this chat helps boost the org’s overall performance.

Build in “thinking time.” Plan ahead and prepare by sending over your convo topic or question the morning of. This sets a clear agenda and gives your boss (or your boss’s boss) time to develop their thinking instead of riffing on the spot.

You might be surprised how much you can cover in just 15 minutes, but don’t forget the cardinal rule of micro meetings: Never run over. It shows you respect everyone’s busy schedule. Plus, there’s less time to say something dumb.—CS

We’ll save you the kombucha and beer tap jokes—last week WeWork finally filed for bankruptcy.

• You’ve probably seen the free-fall numbers: Once valued at $47 billion, it’s now worth ~$44.5 million. That means it lost 99.91% of that valuation.

But beyond numbers that would give anyone vertigo, what’s really interesting about this bankruptcy story is that a lot of people reporting on it agree that WeWork as a concept is still a great idea. It was just executed in the literal worst way possible:

• As finance provocateur Matt Levine puts it: “WeWork was, like, the very most famous example in the world of a company that grew too fast while trying to meet grandiose expectations.”
• Then add in founder Adam Neumann’s big-picture visions, his summer camp parties, and a “community-adjusted EBITDA” fiasco and that logical biz model of renting office space to startups and WFHers starts to become a worse idea than sending someone a live animal for their birthday.

On a non-billion-dollar scale, we regular managers also need to be careful that our own leadership isn’t sinking a quality ship.

Here are three checks and balances you can set up to make sure you’re not tempted to walk barefoot around the West Village:

Encourage radical candor (aka being blunt without being a jerk) by setting up regular opportunities for your team to give you feedback. Then actually act on it.

• If you’re not sure where to start, ask one of our favorite questions from Kat Cole, COO of Athletic Greens: “If you were in my shoes, what’s one thing you’d do differently?”

Require team meetings you’re not a part of, to make sure you’re not leading everyone astray.

• At Morning Brew Learning, we call these “mutiny meetings.” They’re not for starting a coup, but rather to discuss team goings-on without needing full approval by the big boss.
• Bonus: That’s one less meeting you have to attend.

Take more vacations, seriously. In the trading world, people in certain roles are required to take two weeks off without any contact with the team so that any “unauthorized” (read: illegal) activity on the trading floor is rooted out.

• Take the same approach with your team, with hopefully less fraud.
• Also, a stressed-out leader is a great way to create stressed-out team members, so enjoy that frozen daiquiri.

Beyond that, our only other rec is to avoid adjusting next quarter’s KPIs to “elevate the world’s consciousness.”

Golden Corral, Olive Garden, and…Morning Brew Learning? We don’t have unlimited breadsticks and never-ending soup, but we do have All Access.

Here’s how you’ll level up with this one-year membership:

• Bottomless mimosas courses. Learn from one-week live and on-demand Sprints across data, leadership, strategy, and business core topics.
• Exclusive professional community. Build connections and confidence through live events with expert operators, facilitated 1:1 and group networking sessions, and members-only events & panels.
• Resources galore. Gain access to tips, toolkits, and templates that help you solve professional challenges and accelerate your career in the moment.

Final deets: We’re offering early access into the membership at a discounted price—save $200 if you sign up now.

Learn more and snag your spot here.

Chances are, if you’ve been in any industry long enough, your jargon radar will wear out.

• If you’re in strategy, you’ll probably start saying things like “What levers can we pull to take out the trash sooner?” to your significant other.
• Or if you’re in finance, you might assume your friends are as bullish on ordering appetizers as you are.

And if you’re in marketing? Well, let’s see how good your jargon radar is these days. We’ll give you the definition, and you have to guess the word or acronym we’re talking about.

• The strategy when you send out automated emails on a certain schedule to slowly convince someone to purchase
• The percentage you get from visitors to purchasers
• A set of strategic activities and messaging that promotes a biz objective
• The combination of November’s major deal days
• A stand-alone email, typically sent out right before a launch, promotion, or sale, with a single call to action