When Bryan Stockton was pushed out as CEO of toymaker Mattel, he fingered a complacent company culture for dipping profits. In fact, he went one step further and blamed the lack of innovation on bad meetings. Stockton’s story has been on my mind because I’m releasing a new book today called No Fail Meetings. Meetings […]
Archive for Meetings
How to Shut Down Annoying Meeting Behaviors
Tips for Dealing with 8 Common Disruptors
As a young leader, I was excited to attend the annual gathering of my professional organization. It promised three days of learning and networking, plus a few business sessions. During the first session, one of my elder colleagues, a man wearing bright red suspenders, rose to ask a question, something about whether a point of […]
How Did We End Up with So Many Meetings?
A History of Distrust and Micromanagement
Meetings are a necessity. Meetings also often stink. Typically, they are a waste of time. There are too many meetings—and most of them are often poorly-organized, lack coherent agendas, serve to do little more than reaffirm hierarchies than achieve results. As a result, poorly-run meetings cost companies $37 billion a year in lost productivity. Employees […]
How to Keep Meetings from Ruining Your Productivity
Meetings are a necessary part of organizational life, and every leader needs to convene them. Unfortunately, we often allow them to run on autopilot, trapping our team in a never-ending cycle of pointless meetings. Today, we’ll show you the real purpose of meetings. And we’ll share 3 questions that will make your team more productive […]
Don’t Bet the Farm on Brainstorming
3 Reasons to Think Twice Before Scheduling that Meeting
I can tell you with some precision the moment I first doubted group brainstorming. This was many moons ago. A medium sized media firm that wanted to grow much larger had engaged my consulting services. They held a company-wide powwow, flying most of the managers and yours truly to corporate headquarters in Darkest Peru. The […]
Your Own Personal Time Machine
5 Simple Ways to Recover the Lost Art of Note Taking
I spend most of my work-life in meetings. Note-taking is a survival skill. Yet, I am surprised at how few people bother to take notes in meetings. Those who do sometimes express frustration at how ineffective the exercise seems to be. In this post, I’d like to expound on why I think you should take notes in meetings and then offer a few suggestions on how to do it better.