Why Managing Sucks and How to Fix It: A Results-Only Guide to Taking Control of Work, Not People

Chapter 5

No More Bullshit Meetings. Period.

Meetings. They look like work. They feel like work. They smell like work. There’s nothing like getting the team around a conference table, batting around random thoughts to make sure everyone is on the same page. And you never know when a good topic or idea will mightily rise up out of conference table dust! Plus, there isn’t a single technology substitute that lends itself to reading body language in terms of effective communication like being physically face to face. You can’t do that in an e-mail or on a conference call. And that Skype thing is just too impersonal. Also, I can never get it to work.

Huh?

People all over the globe tell us they waste anywhere from 30 to 80 percent of their time in unproductive meetings. Although someone feels (for whatever reason) that these meetings are vitally important to the work, most participants feel like it’s such a waste of time that it requires blood pressure medication just to get through it. There are so many bad meetings that even if a meeting is good, we’re so burned out from the ineffective ones that we can hardly muster up the energy to be excited.

Meetings dominate the way we do business today. According to a network MCI Conferencing white paper titled “Meetings in America: A study of trends, costs and attitudes toward business travel, teleconferencing, and their impact on productivity,” approximately 11 million meetings occur in the United States each and every day. Most professionals ...