It's not about being honest - I've been to many meetings with talented people that thought they had everything under control but looking at their reactions and

It's not about being honest - I've been to many meetings with talented people that thought they had everything under control but looking at their reactions and behaviour yeilded another answer. These people were deeply honest, they just hadn't seen all the perspectives and ramifications of what they were doing, or were a bit too positive. Good managers know this and use it productively - it is one of the primary functions of meetings. This probably touches on one of the big differences between engineer types and business types - engineers think it's all about technology and business types think it's all about people. The truth is probably somewhere in between. My point is that the communication you do in a meeting is very very different from the communication you get from e-mail. Psychologists have found that when you interact with people up to 90% of the communication is non-verbal. This means that the bandwidth of talking face-to-face is ten times as high as sending an e-mail. There's a pretty interesting wikipedia entry on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-verbal_communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-verbal_communication