I attended business unit meetings Wednesday and Thursday. I am fortunate I do not have to go to as many meetings as I used to, but I have sat through my share of lengthy boring meetings over the years. Several years ago at a meeting of our business unit I tried a change of pace from dry technical presentations with a presentation titled Meetings, Meetings: A Serious?? Guide to Making Meetings More Fun. Everyone was very amused - except for the vice president. He was definitely not amused. I just found a copy of that presentation.
The presentation was based on a book I have called Meetings, Meetings: How to Manipulate Them And Make Them More Fun by Winston Fletcher. I like some of the quotes from that book:
“One either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.” Peter Drucker
“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything” J.K. Galbraith
"If you can avoid a decision, do so. If you can get someone else to avoid a decision, don't avoid it yourself. If you cannot get one person to avoid the decision, appoint a committee." Sharu S. Rangnekar
Some of the quotes I called meeting mathematics:
“The usefulness of a meeting is in inverse proportion to the attendance” H.V. Prochnow
“The possibility of avoiding decisions increases in proportion to the square of the number of members on the committee.” Sharu S. Rangekar
“The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.” E. Shanahan
“The point of total ineffectiveness in a committee is reached when the total membership exceeds twenty.” Cyril Northcote Parkinson
I also recently saw an article in Popular Science called Make Meetings Efficient. It included links to some websites with help for managing your time in meetings, for things like online meetings or meeting scheduling. One I found amusing was called Get Me Out Of Here www.getmooh.com. You can set it up to call your cell phone at a prescheduled time, and then you escape from the meeting because of your so-called "important" call.
Attending meetings is sometimes unavoidable, but they can be more efficient - and more fun.
3 comments:
I didn't know you could post PowerPoint. Wonderful.
I went to a course one time called Managing Meetings. It covered the points you raise but I was sure choked, as I thought it would be about managing to avoid the useless things.
I can see where your VP would be unhappy. Bosses love to hold meetings. It is what they do. Telling them meetings are useless is also telling them THEY are useless. Just because it is true doesn't mean they necessarily want to hear it.
You can't post PowerPoint directly. I saved it as Windows media file slides, and then used Windows Movie Maker save it in a video format.
I hope these don't apply to Prayer Meetings!!!
Post a Comment