More from Jeffrey Phillips:
Look, if Toyota can have axles and door frames show up exactly when they are needed in the manufacturing process of your next Camry, and can coordinate thousands of suppliers to have parts delivered just when they are needed on the plant floor to minimize investment and cost, why can't we do the same? In a time when labor costs are the largest cost element in most businesses, are we being as efficient as we can be with meetings?A few months ago, I read about a Microsoft practice to put a guesstimate of the average hourly wage of everyone attending a meeting on the whiteboard at the start of the meeting. (Probably one essay or another from Joel Spolsky.) The reason? To keep everyone focused on how much a meeting is costing the company/shareholders. (That 15 minute digression on print drivers in Windows 2.0 was certainly interesting. But was it really worth $n x m to the project? Maybe next time you shouldn't drone on about such meaningless trivia for 15 minutes. Or at all.) The (desired) result here is to keep meetings crisp, quick and productive.Try this: plan your next meeting and rather than invite everyone to show up for the entire event, publish a schedule and have people come in only when they are needed, and invite them to leave if there's nothing more they can contribute. It will be more productive for you and for them, but you've got to be able to stick to an agenda. But since you are a highly productive person, you already publish an agenda for your meetings and stick closely to it, right?
Yes, I had to sit through a bad meeting today. It was depressing watching the meter tick upwards, especially when the matter under discussion impacted less than half of the attendees.
There are two strategies I like for managing meetings. One is "leave when bored." This one really hurts the ego of the person overseeing the meeting, but if everyone is allowed to leave when they're bored, the person running the show has a vested interest in keeping things moving. Few managers have the courage to allow this, though.
The other strategy is one that a friend's company instituted and it tickled me to no end. Basically, no one is allowed to call a meeting unless they fill out a long form stating the goal of the meeting, the attendees, if the actual goal was accomplished, etc. People had to sign off on the form too, if I recall correctly. My friend was aghast at the silly makework involved and went to talk to the VP who ordered this and said "I know you're not stupid. Why are you making us do this?"
He replied: "You're right. I'm not stupid."
That was when she realized what was going on. By making the paperwork somewhat onerous (but not so bad that it stops meetings in their tracks), managers found that meetings were painful for them, too. The paperwork was hated so much that managers didn't call meetings unless they were absolutely necessary. Email and IM seemed to solve a lot more problems.
