The other day, I got an e-newsletter with the lead article
\ntitled, “How to Improve ROI from Your Business Meetings.”<\/p>\n
And my immediate thought was: that’s easy — don’t HAVE business
\nmeetings!<\/p>\n
In my nearly 4 decades in business, I have yet to find a bigger
\nwaste of time than face-to-face meetings … with the possible
\nexception of social media.<\/p>\n
Back in the day, pre-email, pre-internet, and pre-skype, I did go
\nto some meetings with local clients here in NJ.<\/p>\n
For out-of-state clients, we typically had the meeting over the
\nphone.<\/p>\n
And guess what?<\/p>\n
I consistently found that we could accomplish the same thing in a
\n20 to 30-minute phone call with the distant clients …<\/p>\n
…as I did in a 2-hour face-to-face meeting with local clients.<\/p>\n
And 2 hours was the actual meeting time. When you added in the
\nround-trip car ride — an hour each way — the meeting took 4
\nhours, or half a day of my time.<\/p>\n
So now, no matter whether the client is down the block or in
\nAustralia, our meeting is via phone, email, or Skype.<\/p>\n
I just don’t meet with people in person, unless they are willing
\nto pay a hefty fee to do so. And often not even then.<\/p>\n
My Facebook friend PO writes: “Business meetings are the death
\nknell of profitability, productivity, and employee morale —
\nsenseless.”<\/p>\n
Another FB friend, BM, cites a study about meetings from the
\nOrganizational Development group at MIT.<\/p>\n
This computer-simulation study concluded that the optimum number
\nof people to have in a business meeting for maximum productivity
\nis 1.3 — which can mean just me if I’ve gained some weight!<\/p>\n
DG comments, “Business meetings should be concise and pertinent.
\nAnd if they fill up someone’s calendar, my suspicion increases as
\nto their necessity and value.”<\/p>\n
JF opines: “The bigger the organization, the less productive the
\nmeetings in my overall experience.”<\/p>\n
JL says this about meetings: “If you take an hour’s salary
\nfor each person in the room plus the cost of someone making an
\nagenda and a report and then compare that with what came out of
\nit, you’d have to ask yourself why you did that. Meetings: yuk,
\ngag, awful.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other day, I got an e-newsletter with the lead article titled, “How to Improve ROI from Your Business Meetings.” And my immediate thought was: that’s easy — don’t HAVE business meetings! In my nearly 4 decades in business, I have yet to find a bigger waste of time than face-to-face meetings … with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1571"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1572,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571\/revisions\/1572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}