Meeting Communication

I believe that one of the reasons that people generally do not like meetings, or hate meetings is that along with a meeting typically comes some hard deadlines. There is usually more than just a deadline for the speech and slides, but the information being reported in the speech and slides. There’s lots of pressure to get the tasks requested to be completed from the last meeting to be completed by the next meeting so you can report that the task has been completed. Now with the ease and speed of producing or editing a PowerPoint slide, you can work on a task right up to the last minute before the meeting and update the task as completed just in time for the meeting. It’s a grown up version of peer pressure. You have to face the entire group at the meeting and report you success and/or failures. I’d write more, but I have to complete a task or two before my next meeting.

A friend of mine sent me an article on someone that listed what they thought were the top presenters of all time. top ten presenters the list is from the knowHR blog. Steve Jobs is listed. He’s one of my top ten. Guy kawasaki is another good one. Dr. Martin Luther King – yes. But they leave out people like John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. They also include Andy Kuafman? Maybe there should be a site to vote and keep a running Top Ten Presenters list like the New York Times best book seller list?

I really like using GoToMeeting.com for our business capabilities presentation. I can pitch to anyone in the country or world for that matter. It takes two minutes to setup. We just did a face-to-face meeting because the potential client was only a few blocks away. It was fun to get out and meet the client, but it took way too much time. We’ll soon see if the results are better than the virtual meetings. I can’t wait for the day when I only need to make a virtual commute.

Time is so short these days I find I occassionally have an email meeting. Instead of just emailing an agenda, I do long notes to the agenda item. I then ask the potential meeting attendees (usually my business partners) to comment and add suggestions. The email circulates a few times and in the end we have our meeting notes without the meeting.  This works some of the time when our demanding schedules limit when we can meet or meet at all. Is it really a meeting? Will all meetings be virtual some day? email can be dangerous if it is misinterpreted. It seems most people would rather shoot off a quick email than pick up the phone or walk across the hallway these days. I’m guilty of this myself sometimes. But sometimes it is just easier to write an email than leave a voice mail. There was a good article about the dangers of “mis-read” emails in the NYTimes: NY Times article: E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)

I’ve only heard bad things about PPT 2007, such as they changed all the quick key short cuts. No one I know is using it. Of hundreds of clients we have working with PowerPoint, no one has requested it to be in 2007? PPT 2003 works well. It is reliable. Fast. What more do we need? Check out PPT 2007 at Microsoft.com