Meeting Communication

People often forget about one of the most important cost factors of a meeting – the audience’s compensation. I’ve seen people balk at the cost of a $1000 cost of PPT visual support costs. This is kind of penny wise, but pound foolish if they considered the 400 people in thier audience was probably costing them $20,000+ per hour. And the cost of not communicating thier important message could priceless.

www.payscale.com came up with a cute little widget tool to monitor the cost of your meeting. Check it out: Meeting Cost Minder.

Have you had one lately? Maybe one of the reasons som many people complain about bad meetings is that they don’t know how to have a good meeting. They don’t know what it takes to plan for and facilitate a good meeting. It takes work. It takes time. A good meeting can be motivating and great fun.

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

I have heard this before, but once again I heard from a client that they were being told to limit the number of slides to 30 for thier meeting. This is rediculous because the number of slides should have no bearing on the time/cost of designing and producing the slide or speaker time. Sure the is a differnce in presenting 30 slides or 100 slides but 30 vs 50 can make no difference in the time/cost of producing the slides nor the time it takes to present them.

The key is producing slides that help communicate your information. Cramming 4 slides of information onto one slide takes longer to produce than four seperate slides. More important, is that it can take less time to speak to 4 seperate slides, than 4 slides of informatin on a single slide. The information on the individual slides will often communicate the information more efffectively than the crammed single slide representing the 4 slides.

It is silly to think that condensing 4 slides down to one is gong to improve your meeting communication. Yes you should always look to summerize and make your point with efficient use of slide space real estate  and numbers of slides, but don’t fall for the 30 minute speech means a 30 slide maximum. The general rule I go by for slides is “less is more”. I have seen great speakers zip through 100 exciting, fast moving, impactful slides in 30 minutes. I have also seen too many horrible speakers spend one and a half hours with ten slides. What speaker would you rather listen to?

We had an important meeting yesterday with one of our bigger clients. Since we are in the business of producing presentions, we often go presentationless for our own meetings. We’re often too busy meeting client’s presentation production deadlines to work have time to work on our own.

But we decided this meeting had a level of importance that demanded the attention and effort it would take to prepare a good presentation deck. About a week before the meeting, I started the process by putting together an outline of notes and pulling together some ideas to modify and build  few new slides to our core pitch deck.

 My partners and I emailed back and forth some notes about the meeting strategy and the key points we wanted to communicate. We decided that even if we did not end up using the slide deck, by developing the PowerPoint deck, it would be a good road map of our meeting communication strategy.

We met a number of times to dicuss the strategy and review the deck. In reviewing the deck and developing the individual slides we planned and strategized what we would say, what was important, how to say it, and what not to say. We asked each other questions, we asked questions we thought our client might ask and guessed reactions to the messages we were going to say and emphesize with supporting visuals. We added some slides, deleted others and ehanced the most important.

We did get to use our slides after a few anxious moments of room projector technical glitches. The slides with high visual value to ehance what I was saying as the primary speaker, kept us on track and I feel we did get to say all we planned to say and more. It was a good meeting. I’m not sure of the final outcome yet – as the agreement discussed has yet to be signed. But the slides helped get our message communicated. But they also helped us develop the message. We had time for questions during our presentation and time left over to discuss things further after the last slide. We were prepared to answer every question thrown at us, even the hard ones.

In the end we experienced first hand the added value we often speak of when we help clients develop a PowerPoint deck , that it is not only more effective slides you end up with, but the process of developing the better slides with high visual value – helps prepare for a successful meeting!

I spoke to a client today that said his boss and management team was very conservative in thier “look”. They did not like anything to fancy or polished. He said they refrain from too much creativity because they are afraid of looking too good and people thinking they spent too much money to look good. This was an executive in a Fortune 500 company.

This is nuts. These people don’t get the difference between a “pretty” slide vs an effective slide. The idea is to develop a visual that effectively communicates your message. That means the audience gets it quickly, or easy to comprehend and remember.

Maybe these companies that use this excuse for boring, ugly, distracting slides (but look like they did them themselves – cheap) would not be in such cost cutting modes if they had a culture that made the most of thier critical meeting time with effective visuals.

I have often wondered if I could create an investment fund based on the quality of the companies visuals – I would bet it could be a good indicator of a companies health and future.