Boring Meetings Suck

And now let's dim the lights...

2009-10-10T09:00:00.006-05:00

Reading slide text verbatim sucks.

www.toothpastefordinner.com

How You Know When You've Lost The Meeting

2009-09-14T12:07:00.002-05:00

AdverGirl.com has a great post on her blog listing the top 10 signs that you've lost the meeting. My favorites...

#4. The Blackberry Daisy Chain
Let me assure you: this really happened. It is not the stuff of folklore. I heard it from the stranded facilitator herself. First, one Blackberry buzzes away on the conference table. It's picked up to a smirk. And then before you know it, they're all buzzing away. An underground meeting taking over your meeting! And a comically themed one no less.

#6. The Sigh Heard ‘Round The Office
Is it disappointment? Boredom? Frustration with the process? Who knows, but when that long, deep, loud-as-the-sound-of-the-tornado-coming-in-that-weird-Helen-Hunt-movie sigh rushes out, it's time to wrap it up!

#8. The Slow Drain Of People
This derailing is most likely to happen on a Friday afternoon or during those first few weeks of back-to-school before the parents get back on the right carpool / handoff / soccer schedule. Someone announces that they have to leave 15 minutes early. Someone else gets an urgent cell phone call and trucks off to the lobby (and eventually the parking lot). Another "realizes' that the meeting runs 30 minutes longer than her calendar noted. Before you know it, you're presenting to the leftover pastries and the two enthusiastic interns.

Death by PowerPoint

2009-08-25T08:48:00.002-05:00

We always knew presentations could be boring -- but could they actually be KILLING YOU???

I ran across a very cool presentation on SlideShare by Alexei Kapterev titled "Death by PowerPoint." Alexei provides solid suggestions and guidelines for improving your presentation skills, and successfully delivering your message to the audience in a manner that allows for better comprehension (and fewer deaths.)

Death by PowerPoint

View more documents from Alexei Kapterev.

Maybe we are starting to get through...to some anyway

2009-06-18T08:47:00.002-05:00

An email I received yesterday - that I thought worthy to share as a smile came across my face as I read it....

Excerpt:

"They took me through 4.5 hours of interviews with 9 people and ended it with me giving them a presentation. I dutifully had printed out 9 copies of riveting PowerPoint to aid me in my spiel but when I went to get them out the CEO started laughing noticeably. They had apparently just had a training session / meeting on doing meetings without PowerPoint :) I promptly shoved the copies back in my folder, proceeded to drop your name and book and let them know you were available for corporate events. I then proceeded to lead a "discussion" for the next 30 minutes."

I'm sorry the CEO noticeably laughed, but glad he knew of the book and their organization had made some change in the engagement factor of their meetings.

Thank you for sharing "interviewee."

Jon
Bore No More!

I Will Survive (your horrid presentation)

2009-04-27T10:35:00.003-05:00

Taking four cues from the Gloria Gaynor disco hit, @SlideMagnet has posted an "I will Surviv(al)" guide for your unfortunate audience members.

Go Walk Out the Door
That's right... it's an option. And if you can't leave, sit close to the exit and take a few 'breaks' during the boring meeting.

Just Turn It Around Now
Being in the audience doesn't mean you're powerless to affect the Powerpoint presentaiton from Hell. If the presenter gets off topic, asking a question designed to get the group back on track will bring you the gratitude of all in attendance.

Hold Your Head Up High
Some presenters are frightened to speak in front of groups. Giving the speaker your full attention, and practicing active listening techniques such as eye contact, smiling, and nodding can help both you AND the speaker survive this session.

Learn How to Carry On
When all else fails, you've probably got a dozen other projects that would benefit from using this time to organize your thoughts, and create action lists. As long as you can pull this off with the presenter (or your boss) thinking that you're diligently creating notes on the materials being presented, you will survive this boring meeting to inevitably be able to attend more boring meetings in the future.

I've only paraphrased the great tips from SlideMagnet. Do yourself a favor and click here to read the entire article.

Seth Godin's Meeting Guarantee

2009-03-26T11:53:00.002-05:00

Seth Godin shares nine ways to get serious about your business meeting problems, getting things done, and saving time. He's offered a full refund if not fully satisfied with the results. ;)

My favorites...
#1: All problems aren't the same, so why are all meetings the same?

#4: Remove all the chairs from the meeting room.

#6: Use an egg timer. Once it goes off, the meeting is over!

#9: If you're not adding value to the meeting -- LEAVE. You can always read the meeting summary later.

Click here for the full list of Seth's insights.

Using your Phone, PDA, Blackberry to take notes...? We want to hear from you.

2009-02-25T08:49:00.003-05:00

It's interesting how things change in just a couple years since the first edition of Boring Meetings Suck was released. I find it fascinating to review and even use some of the social media applications and technologies that have gone mainstream in use of the organization, documentation and distribution of information related to our still non-stop internal meetings.

so that being said, here's what I would be interested in knowing from you all.

Have you ever used your phone, blackberry, PDA or other handheld device to take notes instead of using the "old fashioned" pen and paper?

Here's a link to the poll so you can track the results. http://polls.linkedin.com/p/24214/vejtx

Thanks for sharing your insight!

Jon Petz
Co-Author

Seth Godin Thinks You're Boring, Too.

2009-01-15T08:03:00.003-05:00

Seth says in his blog post today: "If people aren't discussing your products, your services, your cause, your movement or your career, there's a reason. The reason is that you're boring."

How do you get UN-boring?
Well, if we're talking Boring Meetings, you need to buy a copy of our book . If it's something else, the solution is neither as quick, nor as easy, nor as inexpensive as buying a book (even our book.)

Seth says: "You don't get unboring for free. Remarkable costs time and money and effort, but most of all, remarkable costs a willingness to be wrong."

Get more of Seth's sage advice in his interview with Ducttape Marketing guru John Jantsch (he's never boring.)

Boring Meeting Activities Wiki

2009-01-14T14:22:00.003-05:00

Someone built a wiki page that collects ideas on things to do while sitting in a boring meeting.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ActivitiesForBoringMeetings

I wonder where they found the time to build it... using the time spent sitting in boring meetings perhaps???

PowerPoint Lessons

2008-11-10T01:18:00.002-05:00

This guy's PowerPoint skills are so bad, he took a presentation on tour and became a successful comedian!

Don McMillan provides a humorous (and yet insightful) presentation on how people should NOT be using PowerPoint.

Can Boring be Good for You?

2008-05-30T10:49:00.002-05:00

It can be according to CNBC.com Managing Editor Allen Wastler! In his article "Read What's Boring... It's Good For You" Wastler makes this comment: "People generally don't read boring stuff, even though they should."

The article is about boring emails and legal disclaimers that would better educate and advise people if they read them (but they don't.) People simply don't read these things completely because disclaimers seem to be a standard case of jumbled jargon intended to cover someone's ass and prevent them from being sued, and email warnings blend into the billion other email meesages we receive, all of which purport to be just as import to our well being as the one Wastler mentions in his aticle.

The entire time I'm reading the article, the solution is apparent and my inner voice is screaming it at the top if its inner lung -- stop making the information boring!

Finally, at the end of the article (good thing it wasn't so boring that I stopped reading it!) Wastler says "Maybe if we spruced disclaimers up, more people would read them..." and my inner voice says, "By Jove, I think he's got it!" (apparently my inner voice speaks a lot like Henry Higgins), but, alas, so close to the epiphany and then he shrinks away -- "And if we spruced up tech emails, people would read those too? Okay, I'm dreaming."

So close... so close...

If you want to check out a pretty cool disclaimer, look at the bottom of any product created by sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer. His fineprint (perhaps we should rename it "funprint") states: "Don't even think about reproducing this document without written permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer, Inc."

Since I am an official "Gitomer Groupie" I stole (ahem, paid homage to) Gitomer's 'funprint' by adding some to the Boring Meetings Suck website -- just scroll to the bottom of the page to see what I mean...

How to Fix a Broken Meeting

2008-05-04T08:14:00.003-05:00

Business Week tells the story of Perry Klebahn, the man who's taken over as CEO of ailing bag company Timbuk2. He wanted to keep the 70 employees of the San Francisco company informed and engaged, but what he'd hoped would be an open forum for discussion turned into an awkward weekly event...

Klebahn was a graduate of Stanford's product design program and a part-time professor there since 1996. He's friends with two professors who were teaching a course about applying design principles to business processes or systems. The idea was to treat an organization as a prototype to be refined and improved. The professors -- Robert Sutton, an expert in organizational behavior and author of, most recently, The No Asshole Rule, and Debra Dunn, a 22-year veteran of Hewlett-Packard who held leadership positions in the marketing, manufacturing, and human resources divisions before moving to corporate HQ -- approached Klebahn about a short, Timbuk2-based project for the class and homed in on the meeting as the right-sized problem. It was, says Dunn, "small enough for students to wrap their arms around and large enough that it would make a significant impact. Meetings have tremendous symbolic power."

In February 2008 Sutton and Dunn took some students to observe a company meeting at Timbuk2. Most people in the meeting were standing or sitting on the floor. Sutton says, "The sun was glaring through the windows, forcing many to shield their eyes. You couldn't tell who was in charge. Some people were called on to give status reports didn't have anything to report... one person fell asleep. The meeting was broken."

Two weeks after the class had observed the meeting, Klebahn and his management team met with the students to hear their proposed solutions, most of which focused on giving employees more control and a greater sense of ownership of the meeting.

Click here for a complete list of the solutions the team developed for Timbuk2.

Planning is Key to Sucking Less

2008-04-08T11:36:00.004-05:00

If you use my friend Tom Terez's new meeting agenda planner, perhaps your meetings won't suck quite so much.

The PDF form provides a simple framework for all the key elements of a productive meeting:

Purpose
Roles
Agenda items
Time frames
Decisions
Next steps
...and more

And if you use the quick-check assessment tool to evaluate and improve the overall meeting process, your next meeting will suck even LESS.

The best part is that Tom has posted the agenda planning tool online, and it's free for all to share. Click here to get your copy.

Boring Meetings as "Social Theater?"

2008-03-22T17:03:00.002-05:00

Here's a unique view on Boring Meetings...

The author feels that attending meetings offers the opportunity to stand out from the crowd and participate in what he has termed "social theater."

I'm not certain that I agree with his premise, but I have hope for him -- he also suggests in the article that speakers in these meeting should have to pay their audience by the minute.

No Explanation Needed

2008-02-29T14:47:00.003-05:00

Bored Workers are Big Threat

2008-02-27T15:41:00.005-05:00

ManageSmarter.com reports that a recent study by Sirota Survey Intelligence found that bored workers are a bigger threat to company morale than stressed-out and over-worked employees.

"Feeling overworked -- a condition that could lead to job burnout -- is far more prevalent than feeling bored, yet both have harmful effects on employees and their companies," says Douglas Klein, president of Sirota. "Interestingly, being bored has far more serious consequences for an organization than being overworked."

What Ticks Us Off At Meetings

2008-02-06T00:59:00.000-05:00

Monday's USAToday.com chart and poll focused on what bugs us most about meetings. The bulk of those surveyed (27%) said that disorganized meetings which seemed to have no purpose or agenda ticked them off most. Second place went to people who Interrupt in meetings (17%) and the third most bothersome thing in meetings were Nappers (16%).

The results from the poll (at the time of this writing) asking how readers would describe meetings in their own workplace showed the following:
34% felt meetings were too unfocused
30% thought meetings were too long
30% thought meetings were irrelevant to day-to-day tasks
and a whopping 6% thought their meetings were perfect in every way.

BMS Note: Apparently 6% of the people taking the poll were folks who loved to hold boring meetings.

BestIdeas for Meetings

2008-01-26T13:01:00.001-05:00

The email newsletter for Best100Ideas.com has published a list of best ideas for managing meetings. Although a couple of the ideas sound very similar to concepts shared in my book, Boring Meetings Suck, I especially like their concept of the Three Sentences Meeting...

Three Sentences Meetings:
Set a rule for a specific type of meetings in which each participant may say only three sentences during the entire meeting. This would make people concentrate on the most important messages they feel most strongly about in the meeting. A Three Sentence Meeting would be short and to the point. You should send required data or a list of major issues in advance, thus allowing people to express their major insights, reservations, suggestions and positions in those three sentences.

Three Sentences Meetings are certainly a way to cut the amount of hot air released in a conference room, but if you're sending pre-meeting data and the topic agenda to the group via email, why not simply have everyone hit REPLAY TO ALL and write their three sentences in an email? This way you could avoid another boring meeting altogether.

Best100Ideas.com offers a lot of valuable ideas, and they even have an eBook of 100 Creative Presentation Ideas. Definitely worth a look.

Time Management Through More Meetings

2007-12-17T13:46:00.000-05:00

Apparently the Department of Boring Meetings thinks there is a better way to organize the workday -- and they want to have some meetings to discuss it.

But don't worry, there are doughnuts for the team with the best ideas.
Or muffins. We can totally do muffins...

From the memo:
So let's plan to have a few ad hoc powwows next week to discuss the meeting situation, vis-a-vis the workplace. The prioritized goal of these meetings will be to draw up a comprehensive road map for what we should be aiming for while avoiding the stumbling blocks we've encountered in the past. The point here is to take a step back and reevaluate how we do things here, on a macro level.

Please bring a minimum of 15 topics to discuss, with a focus on "how to minimize wasted work." Of course, more ideas are always welcome. We'll be going through these point-by-point and selecting the top 20 to be discussed at next week's Productivity Enhancement off-site sit-down.

Once we've highlighted a list of problems, we're going to break up into smaller groups to tackle inter-group communication problems and idea bottlenecking, and then hopefully do some real blue-sky thinking. These groups will spend the majority of Thursday's retreat developing proactive steps that they, as a group or as individuals, can implement post facto. These groups will be called "solution-innovators" (SI for short) and each SI will meet every other week to track overall progress and facilitate productivity improvements.

I'll be floating between the two groups to gauge the temperature of the room.

The team that comes up with the best solutions at the end of each week will be rewarded with doughnuts. So by Wednesday at noon please e-mail me your top five doughnut preferences so we can have a good selection for the winners. Or, if you'd rather have muffins, we can do muffins. Totally up to you.

Full article at TheOnion.com

Get Me Out Of Here!

2007-12-12T11:30:00.000-05:00

Wish you could get out of those boring meetings?

These guys can help...

Power Points

2007-11-20T17:42:00.000-05:00

Great find via Mike Santoro's "Perfect Pitch" blog on the Duct Tape Marketing Channel.

| View | Upload your own

Unbearable Meetings

2007-10-02T22:23:00.000-05:00

A recent Inc.com article shares study findings on why meetings are just so darn unbearable!

A new "Ouch Point" study by Opinion Research USA measured the tolerance thresholds of U.S. workers at business meetings. Topping the list as the biggest frustration for meeting attendees?

Disorganization.
The study polled 1,037 workers, and 27% ranked disorganized, rambling meetings as the top frustration.

Other findings...

17% said they were annoyed by peers who interrupt and try to dominate meetings
9% said they were bothered by co-workers nodding off
Only 5% said they were frustrated by BlackBerry-checking email hounds
16% cited cell-phone interruptions
6% found meetings without refreshments more annoying than the BlackBerry button-pushers.
8% found meetings without bathroom breaks unbearable
5% were distracted by people leaving the meeting early or arriving late.
4% of respondents said they were most frustrated by meetings that start late and those that end without distributing a written recap.

"If you're asking somebody to participate in a meeting, it has to be, from their perception, worth it to invest the time," said Jeff Resnick, president of Opinion Research USA. "If you are someone calling the meeting, organize it, control everyone during the meeting, and make sure the people there aren't wasting their time."

In time-compressed work environments, where so much focus is placed on productivity, "time spent in meetings that's not considered productive is certainly not helpful."

Amen, brother.

Pecha Kucha: 20-Slides 20-Seconds

2007-09-21T14:15:00.000-05:00

Favorite author Dan Pink explains a new concept in PowerPoint presenting initiated by two Tokyo-based architects who've turned the process into a competive art form.

The rules are simple: 20 slides -- 20 seconds each.
Take 6 minutes and 40 seconds to relate your message, then sit down and shut-up.

Think how much more efficient your meeting would be if everyone who needed to speak would adhere to this simple rule.

Pecha Kucha.
Live it, learn it, love it.

Trust your instincts: have shorter meetings

2007-09-20T07:27:00.000-05:00

Most people think of a "snap judgement" as a bad thing, but according to researchers quick decisions might be best.

From the article...
Study participants were asked to identify an oddly rotated symbol on a screen of more than 650 identical symbols. Those who made quick, instinctive decisions did better at correctly identifying the symbol than those who gave a longer, more thought out answer.

"This finding seems counter-intuitive," said Li Zhaoping of the University College London, one of the authors of the study published online in the journal Current Biology. "You would expect people to make more accurate decisions when given the time to look properly. Instead they performed better when given almost no time to think."

When given time to engage the higher-level processes of the conscious mind, participants guessed wrong because their conscious brain overrode the decision of the lower-level subconscious.

We all "know" what to do -- it's just that few of us trust ourselves to just DO it without peer confirmation that we won't be "wrong" or ridiculed for our actions. According to this study, your gut-instinct is going to be right most of the time anyway so why not skip the decision-stalling meetings and just move forward?

Get more details here...

Boring Training Sucks

2007-08-15T14:24:00.000-05:00

A new article on ManageSmarter speaks to the potentially fatal effects of boring training films in a piece titled "Beyond Death by Video."

From the article...

It's every trainee's worst nightmare. You report for your first day on the job and spend the next eight hours holed up in a room watching dull-as-dirt new-hire training videos.

Even worse, much of the training content is so generic and rudimentary that it doesn’t come close to preparing you for the real-life challenges you'll face in the field.

Unfortunately, for most new hires entering the security-guard services
industry, "death by training video" is an all-too-common scenario...

Read the rest by clicking HERE.