Meeting Communication

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.

I went to a meeting today attended by about 30 people.  It is a networking group I’ve been involved with for years and know the presenter for as many years. He’s an author and very good speaker. I always enjoy his presentations. He has an incredible amount of energy, enthusiasm, and always very knowledgeable of his speaking topic. He also has a great sense of humor that makes his presentations very entertaining.

But his PowerPoint today seemed to be 90% bullet points. He could have just as well handed out (after the meeting), a MS word document with an outline of his speech. He is a good enough speaker to probably get away with out speaker support slides. BUT, if he took the time, or had the time to develop his visuals to support his information rather than just be a duplicate of what he was saying, he could become an exceptional speaker.

He didn’t read his slides. He’s way beyond that in his presentation delivery skills. He basically paraphrased the bulleted text on each slide. Better visuals would help him keep on track and leave more time for his great improvising, personal stories, and humor. His slides would have been easy to enhance and could have made a good presentation into a great presentation.

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.