Sunday, January 18, 2009

Let's have a meeting about this.

There was an article in yesterday's New York Times about meetings. It's called "Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time." You can read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/jobs/18pre.html?8dpc

Here are some of the points of the article, I quote:
*Whoever calls a meeting should be explicit about its objectives. This means specifying tangible goals and assigning responsibility for creating, summarizing and reporting on them. Ask yourself this question: Specifically, what do we want accomplished when we walk out of the room?

*Everyone should think carefully about the opportunity costs of a meeting: How many participants are really needed? How long should the meeting last? Set a definite ending time. Anyone who doubts that the meeting is necessary, or thinks it’s too long, should speak up.

*Don’t just call a meeting and hope the magic happens. Take charge and take personal responsibility for meeting its objectives, whatever they are.
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I cite the above firm in my belief that our jobs, creating what we create is really quite simple. What makes our jobs a brain-suck are the meetings to get to the work, the meetings to sell the work, the meetings to produce the work and then the post-mortem meetings to discuss the work.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does this include briefings that come with an actual, paper-copy brief? Cause those are getting few and far between...

Laura said...

Meeting madness prevails these days. Calling a meeting (without thinking it through) seems to make people think they are important. Maybe they should require meeting training so meetings are tolerable. But then that would be another dreadful meeting.