The Art of Meetings

garym — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:28:50 -0400

Business Know-How: 2002

by Gary Lawrence Murphy
President, Teledynamics Communications Inc.

Someone just called a meeting. A 17-point agenda was circulated yesterday, attendance is mandatory, and a cold chill runs up your spine as you don your pen and palm pilot and psych yourself up for another 90-minute barrage of action points.

Meetings That Work
There's more to a meeting than watching people squirm; we hold meetings for more purpose than because we're lonely, so why do our meetings fail? Maybe it's time to step out from "like everyone else" and into "ahead of the rest".

Like many common causes in business, meeting failures arise not because we do not know any better, but because we try to be something more than who we are, living up to some ideal "business behavior". We hammer out "agenda" memos and hammer on action points -- we do and say things we would use with our friends, yet we do them to the very people we depend on for our success!

Treating our coworkers as friends overrides all other rules, but there are other common sense guidelines to break the grip of "being business-like".

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The Art of Meetings