The ever-prolific (and insightful) Seth Godin points us toward a book that may just transform the way that we approach meetings:
Meetings are death, death to meetings
By SETH GODIN at his blog
I got a note from my friend Michael last week. He was explaining his new job. Apparently, in a typical ten hour day, he has nine hours and fifteen minutes of meetings on his schedule.
Forty-five minutes to do work.
If meetings aren’t work, what are they? They are soul-suckers. They extinguish original thought. They turn a job into a marathon, a career into nothing but chair-warming.
It used to be that most people worked for a living, and a few dispensable ‘suits’ spent their time in meetings. Good riddance, it kept them out of our hair.
Now, of course, the meetings have spread like a pox, and even those that used to produce are sucked into their vortex.
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Well, it really comes down to what you mean when you say a ‘meeting’. A day full of church committees? Well, I’d have to agree. A day of collaborating with different groups of colleagues on interesting projects? Sounds great! The idea that we are all individual laborers, and that only a solo effort can be ‘work’ is just as bad a broad-brush stereotype as the ‘all meetings are soul-crushing’ is.
Jon White