Blog
We welcome comments from anyone on any blog post; we want to generate active, meaningful dialogue about the challenges and opportunities surrounding group meetings, which are clearly the most frequent – and the most frustrating – of all organizational activities. However, we will not approve blatantly commercial comments, and we reserve the right to edit submitted comments to maintain mutual respect and learning, and to remove commercial promotions.
You Can’t Know the Future – But You Can Always Ask “What if?”
November 8, 2016, is election day in the United States. This has been the most contentious, drawn-out, and, yes, tedious election in my memory. Everyone I know is glad it is about to be over. No matter what your politics or political values, I am positive that like me you are relieved we’ve finally reached the end of this unpleasant journey.
One inevitable result of this year’s electoral dysfunction (deliberate pun) has been rampant uncertainty about the future. [continue reading…]
Four Questions to Protect Yourself from Lousy, Time-Wasting Meetings
And, as you know, I even wrote a book about making meetings matter (available on Amazon.com at this link –contact me directly for volume discounts).
Most of my rants have been directed at senior executives and team leaders, because I consider them the most accountable for lousy meetings. After all, it is organizational leaders who set the tone and establish expectations for how things are supposed to work. [continue reading...]
Making Your Meetings Better: The Business Case for a Fix
What is it worth to make your meetings both more efficient and more effective?
As I have been suggesting for the past several weeks, meetings can be improved in many different ways, both by reducing their costs (fewer meetings, shorter meetings, fewer participants, smaller conference rooms, and relying more on virtual meetings), and by improving their outcomes (crisper decisions, more explicit commitments to action, more active follow-up and feedback). [continue reading…]
Three Steps for Increasing Your Meetings ROI
Over the last several weeks I have been exploring several basic ways to improve your organizational ROI for meetings.
Last week I talked about two complementary approaches to improving meeting efficiency:
Holding fewer meetings
Conducting shorter meetings
(See “The Business Case for Making Your Meetings Matter (Part 3)” for details).
Today I am focusing on how distributed meetings can reduce costs in dramatic ways. [continue reading…]
The Business Case for Making Your Meetings Matter (Part Three)
Over the last two weeks, in “Back to Basics: Making Your Meetings More Effective,” and “The Business Case for Making Your Meetings Matter (Part Two),” I have been sharing several basic ideas for improving your organizational ROI for meetings.
Clearly, the only thing that ultimately matters about any meeting is the quality of the decisions made or the ideas developed during the meeting. [continue reading…]
Building the Business Case for Making Your Meetings Matter
Are you frustrated by all the time you waste in lousy, boring, unproductive meetings? Are you ready to do something about it?
Last week, in “Back to Basics: Making Your Meetings More Effective,” I described the only two ways you can enhance meeting productivity:
- Improving outcomes – better decisions, more creative solutions, higher levels of participant engagement, strengthened working relationships, and happier participants;
- Reducing costs – fewer meetings, shorter meetings, and more efficient meetings; leaving more time for people to get their own work done.