Monday, July 30, 2012

How to do away with wasteful meetings:


The other day I attended a meeting where we wasted 3 hours:
A bulk of time was wasted in waiting as the convener did not command the respect and besides that he himself had little respect for time. What else explains a participant-me- readying the meeting room as he grossly failed to tell this even to the maintenance staff? His reaching just on time- may be because of his fear of me- and waiting another 30 minutes to bring the next participant obviously reflected poorly on him?

What about the output?
The output achieved could have been achieved by just 15 minutes purposeful engagement-over the phone! Yep- that's it.

The process would have been far more superior if the discussion had happened by circulation through e-mail. But that needs vision, clarity of thought decisiveness and some amount of leadership.

Lack of purpose leads to lose of sovereignty!
There are people who just love to boss over and when one of the major purpose of calling a meeting is to dish out plain sycophancy, that leads to no where. 
Coming back to our impugned meeting: at the end of 3 hours we left the venue with a sense of emptiness and with serious doubts about the future utility of the decisions taken (subsequently our doubts were proven correct and NONE of the decisions were implemented)

 ... When we go through such a wasteful experience we rue the fact that we decided to participate in the meeting at the first place. 

But please be forewarned : when methodical and honest people simply leave the platform in disgust, genuine management space is ceded! The void is immediately usurped by lumpen elements, who are waiting under the wings! What else explains the caliber and credibility of the current leadership of our country?

So do not give up. If you are not happy with the way a society, committee or a country is functioning; do not just crib and complain, come forward and lead by examples. At a minimum insist on two things:

  1. the meeting should have an Agenda- How-so-ever tentative and
  2. the meeting should end and start in time
Here is a pertinent article on the above: