My ambitious, idiot coworker is from the school of thought which teaches “I know these are lame ideas, but there are a lot of them.” He has a PowerPoint full of these lame ideas.

And yet this will no doubt get the praise of the boss because “it shows lots of hard work and thought” and was of course presented in a meeting the ambitious idiot called and was full of buzzwords the boss uses. At some later point the boss will probably hold up the ambitious idiot as an example the rest of us should aspire to.

Just once I’d like someone to say,

You wasted a lot of time on completely unworkable ideas. Ideas which it is obvious to everyone who works on the account would never be approved by the client or achieve the objectives set out in the assignment. And now you’ve wasted an hour of everyone’s time presenting them. And no doubt plenty more hours in the week to come following up on these awful ideas, interrupting the people who are working on things that might actually work and sell.

Or maybe the problem is with me. What’s wrong with me that I can’t whip up a PowerPoint of all the ideas I’ve crossed out and waste an hour of the department’s time showing all the work I’ve done? Instead of only presenting a few good ideas, which apparently leave the impression that I didn’t spend much time on them.