Do you suffer from meeting mania? Is the meeting you just scheduled really necessary? What are your alternatives? Do you need to convey a message? Put it in a memo. Do you have to make an urgent decision? Take executive action yourself. Do you need group input? Call one or two individuals and survey their feelings. At Paramount Flag Company, the executives don’t have formal meetings because they get together to open the mail every day. President Christophe Morin says, "It only takes half an hour, forty-five minutes at most. And we never have to have formal meetings, because we get together every day." The idea came from Paramount’s parent company, Doublet, a $30 million French manufacturer whose executives also get together every morning at mail time.

Since there is often a huge commitment involved, meetings have the potential either to add something to a person’s life or take something away. Sadly, for many people, meetings take something away. Too often, when a meeting ends, the general feeling is one of relief. At Motorola, consultant Philip Thomas, president of Thomas Group, not only tames the monster, but tries to encourage a higher level of performance with freed-up meeting time. He says, "I tell people - why not chop your staff meetings in half and accomplish the same thing? . . . If you used to have a six hour staff meeting- cut it down to two hours. And tell everyone there, ‘I just gave you four hours . . . I want you to go back and do the same thing with your people.’"

A Virginia Beach, Virginia, company, Linda L. Miles & Associates, which gives more than 100 training seminars a year to health care professionals and their staffs, dreamed up the Tardy Kitty: for every minute someone is late to a meeting, the culprit must pitch one dollar into the kitty. At the end of the quarter, the accumulated fines fund a night out for the staff. Grateful seminar attendees tell Miles that chronic latecomers are now prompt. "The key to its success is that there are no exceptions, because it is usually the leader who is coming late," Miles observes.

In this fast-paced world, meetings can be an ideal forum for making decisions. Yet meetings often end up as buffers, as a convenient way to avoid making a choice, taking a stand, or reaching a decision. "In [PepsiCo’s] freewheeling culture, a committee is defined as ‘a dark alley down which ideas are led . . . to be strangled.’" When meetings at a software company were multiplying geometrically, the programmers stepped in to control the meeting monster. They said, "We’re fed up with meetings. In fact, we’re so fed up with interminable meetings that waste our time, we’ve begun to take drastic measures to show how useless they are." The company introduced a taxi-type meter that pops up on the computer screen to show participants how much the meeting is costing per minute - accounting for individual’s billable time and overhead cost.

Provide Relief from the Pressure Cooker
Our goal is to build productive, healthy companies. Not to do more of the same. Meetings that stretch beyond their point of productivity, meetings that are held "just because," and frequent, important "sacred cow" meetings steep us deeper in time’s pressure cooker. Watch out, because the lid at your place could blow off!

To help you in your quest to tame the meeting monster, here are 9 innovative ways not to hold a meeting:

1. Institute a "meeting patrol team" to inspect the conference room hourly. Fine any groups that overstay the hour limit.
2. Create an outrageous reward system for the person or department holding the fewest meetings per week.
3. Purchase a nifty phone system that makes it easy and fun to receive and leave messages. Get creative with your voice-mail system by rotating greetings that "spoof" the boss.
4. Fax or e-mail the information and ask for a reply.
5. Draft a summary memo, including three to four thoughtful, straightforward specific questions that recipients can respond to via a written message.
6. Invest in the new computer-conferencing software that stages a "meeting" in real time, while each individual interacts from his or her own office setting.
7. Create a daily electronic newsletter. Bob Cummins, president of Fargo Electronics, a $6 million Eden Prairie, Minnesota, specialty manufacturer of printers, countered his 28 employees’ threats of daily meetings with a charged idea: a daily electronic newsletter, which he was sure could be faster and more informative. "It’s been great for eliminating surprises," says Cummins. "If problems with a product keep coming up in the newsletter, no one’s shocked when we discontinue it."
8. Have a conference call set for a limited amount of time. Establish an agenda for the call with a time limit for each item (stated on the agenda so that each participant knows how much time has been allotted). You could even have the operator cut you off after the time is up - just make sure you let everyone know this is going to happen first.
9. Do it now! It’s all right to take action yourself instead of calling a meeting.

Eliminating meetings altogether is not a viable solution for any organization. After all, when they function properly, meetings can be a joy to attend, resulting in positive outcomes and definitive action plans. But it probably wouldn’t hurt to cut down on the number of meetings held - and the length of most meetings - since in reality many meetings turn out to be a waste of time. In order to keep the ideas fresh and flowing, the atmosphere has to be conducive to concrete idea generation, not idea strangulation. Learning when and how to schedule meetings is the first step in helping your organization maximize the productive potential of every meeting. And remember - although it will be an arduous task, you can tame the meeting monster!

Thunderbolt Thinking, Inc.
427 River View Executive Park
Trenton, NJ 08611 USA
Tel: (609) 396-7941 Fax: (609) 396-6260

E-mail: thunderboltthinking@tecker.com
© 2001 Thunderbolt Thinking, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Thunderbolt Thinking^® is a Registered Trademark of Thunderbolt Thinking, Inc.