How to run a meeting

Posted in: Drivel

Chris just produced a 10-point how to do meetings plan. Some especially good notes on enforcing start times, and the more radical suggestion of preventing latecomers from joining. This would be a tough move but kudos if you can pull it off and not politically sabotage yourself... I would add "there's no excuse not to at the very least communicate impending lateness". There really isn't.

Reminds me of something I learnt from Chris Adams at Southwestern when selling books: specify odd start times like 9:58am for the simple reason it makes people think and re-examine the implicit assumption that "10am" means "around, usually after, 10am".

Ian Fetterley passed on the idea when I was working at Schlumberger of having an applet running during the meeting that was a real-time listing of the financial cost of the meeting calculated from the group's cumulative salaries. Ten people in a room for a couple of hours can easily run to thousands of dollars.

But the best advice of all is at the end, "don't go to meetings" :-)

Posted by Paul Makepeace at August 17, 2005 12:32 | TrackBack