Meeting Communication

Many people love to hate PowerPoint because they have sat through way too many ugly, useless, distracting PowerPoint slide shows. They may not be happy to read this article in the Washington Post : School Adds PowerPoint to Application – washingtonpost.com

“But at one of the world’s top business schools, such slide shows are now an entrance requirement. In a first, the University of Chicago will begin requiring prospective students to submit four pages of PowerPoint-like slides with their applications this fall.”

This article and others about the University of Chicago finally acknowledging that PowerPoint is one of today’s standard business communication tools will hopefully persuade others to recognize the imporatance and value of good PowerPoint slides. They call it the “lingua franca of business meetings”. I call it the standard language of business meetings.

In the article, they say Microsoft estimates that 30 million PowerPoint shows are presented every day!

Have you ever had a marathon meeting? I have one with my eSlide partners every month. We have been doing it for over five years.  We’re in the meeting support business, and this makes it difficult to have our own meetings. The problem is that since most of the week we are dealing with challenging client meeting deadlines, it leaves us very little time to meet ourselves.   

It started out as just being a Friday night meeting, because it is the only night of the week that we don’t have production deadlines to meet the next morning – most of the Friday work is usually due Monday morning.   

For a small company we take our meetings very seriously.  Designing and developing presentation visuals for some of the biggest and most successful companies in the world, we have learned from some of the biggest and the best. We always have an agenda, objectives, usually a few slides, budget numbers, AP/AR, cash reports, client updates, a long list of challenges and new business development ideas. We fly in our management consultant from Chicago to assist in facilitating progress, and success. 

Our consultant, Barry Moltz guides us through the perils and challenges of building a small businesses. He’s sometimes the meeting facilitator, business coach, financial consultant, and referee. I think he was surprised at first, at the dedication of the management team. After a typical week of late nights and little sleep, we were still willing to start a meeting at 6 or 7pm on a Friday night and meet until we completed our agenda/objectives, sometimes meeting until 3 or 4 in the morning.  

The meetings were and can still be long, intense, serious, and always productive with some rare, but occasional fun. I believe we have good meetings due to a fair amount of pre-planning, detailed written agendas, and notes about any of the major issues to be covered. We also make good use of projected visuals that keep us all focused on the same shared information. Most important we share information that we hope will lead us to the next level of success. 

And sometimes we have had to review and redefine what success is for us. After a few years, eSlide was financially successful on the books with money in the bank and zero debt, but had absorbed our lives. It was almost absurd having discussions about Quality of Life issues at 4am Saturday morning. It seemed QOL issues were more like GAL, Get-A-Life issues.  

After many QOL discussions, suggested solutions, tries, and implementations, I have a life outside of eSlide. I work from home one day per week, leave the office at a more reasonable time, get to see and spend more time with my family and friends. We’ve hired more people, adjusted our prices and operating hours. And now, I almost have time to write this blog.  

Our monthly marathon management meeting now starts at 2pm and ends around 9 or 10pm. Last month was the first time in five years that it ended early enough to go out to dinner instead of ordering in. Progress continues. Maybe someday we’ll be able to move the meeting to Monday and finish by 6pm. I’ll be sure to put this new meeting schedule challenge on tonight’s agenda.

I went to a half day conference given by Salesforce.com. The meetings were geared to prospective users and new users. I’m a new user. I’ve been impressed with their online based CRM software. I was interested to see if their “sales” conference would match the quality of their product. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve tried many an online meeting tools. For my business needs we usually used Webex in the past. I keep reading about how online meetings are going to finally “take off”. They did for a while after 9/11 when people limited thier travel. And then online meetings were the answer to beating high travel costs. Webex has become so popular many people use it as the term for an online meeting. “I’d like to invite you to an online, Webex like meeting”, I’ve heard more than once.

Micrsoft believes the market is big enough to buy the #2 in the market: Placeware.com and rename it MS LiveMeeting. I’ve never used it. I have attended placaeware meetings in the past – very similar to Webex. They work well, but often end up being expensive.

Webex lookout. I’ve gone to a GoToMeeting and I’m not going back to Webex. It’s a Cisco product. Cisco makes many great networking products. GoToMeeting is another great product. I tried a few trial meetings and after the second one, I signed up for a yearly contract. I have since conducted a dozen or so sales pitch meetings and the technology worked great. It is easy, quick, responsive, and very cost effective. It’s much cheaper than Webex. Interesting enough, my Webex account exec recently called with a specil summer deal at a much reduced cost, but not good enough for me to consider giving up GoToMeeting.

It’s easy enough to start an impromtu meeting. I can be on the phone with someone and suggest, “would you like to see some before and after slides, then just go to “GoToMeeting.com” and enter this meeting ID. Literally 60 seconds or less we’re viewing the same PowerPoint show. I can also give the meeting attendee control and they can show me examples of thier PowerPoint. This all happens near real time. I have lost the need to check with the meeting attendees if they are viewing the same slide – any time I have ever asked while using GoToMeeting – the slides are syncronized.

It’s a great online meeting communications tool to easily add PowerPoint visuals to your conference calls. You can actually share anything on your desktop, any application, any view. And you can specify what application window you want to share to avoid sharing a messy desktop or confidential information that may be open in another window.

Sharing visuals can add a great deal to a conference call’s communication effectiveness. Give it a try. Maybe someday GoToMeeting will try a promotion of giving out “Frequent User Hours”, like “frequent flier miles”. Besides saving the expense and hassle of travelling, it can save the enourmous time cost invovled in travelling.

Online meetings will neve replace the power and effectiveness of a face to face meeting, but if done properly they can become effective meeting communications in situations where a face to face meeting would never happen because of cost/time/scheduling, or just plain difficult meeting logistics.