Meeting Communication

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.

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.

Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal writes about the “dark side of success of the creators of the program PowerPoint”. Originally created for the Mac in 1987, it was Microsoft’s first company acquisition for $14 Million. PowerPoint has since powered it’s way to becoming a standard tool in today’s corporate meetings. It is loved and hated, but used by millions daily. Go to any corporate or hotel conference room in the world today and chances are you will find PowerPoint slides on a screen.

It is easy enough to use that anyone can make a PowerPoint presentation, but not everyone can make a presentation that will help close a billion dollar deal or change the course of history. Smart people know to go to Professional Graphic designers when they need to an important message to be communicated effectively.

The most famous criticism of PowerPoint has come from Ed Tufte. Lee Gomes addresses this with one of the creators of PowerPoint. Robert Gaskins responds with an answer I totally agree with: “Perhaps the most scathing criticism comes from the Yale graphics guru Edward Tufte, who says the software “elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.” He even suggested PowerPoint played a role in the Columbia shuttle disaster, as some vital technical news was buried in an otherwise upbeat slide.
No quarrel from Mr. Gaskins: “All the things Tufte says are absolutely true. People often make very bad use of PowerPoint.”

Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.”

Read the entire, excellent article at this WSJ link:
“PowerPoint Turns 20, As It’s Creators Ponder A Dark Side to Success”
by Lee Gomes, June 20, 2007
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118228116940840904.html

There was an article in the NY Times today about how CNN is going to have a debate where the questions are going to be asked by ordinary people through YouTube Videos. They had to come up with something to make the debates watchable by anyone other than the candidates’ relatives. The debates I’ve watched lately are a joke. I think many high school debaters could do a better job. The last one I saw, the facilitator actually asked the candidates to raise their hand in response to questions. The hand raising seems more appropriate for kindergarten than a presidential debate.

Video based questions raise some interesting questions themselves. You can do a lot with a video. A video question can be a lot more engaging and communicative than just a submitted written question. If a picture is worth a 1000 words, a moving picture is worth?

I’d like to see a debate with PowerPoint visuals. Maybe I’ll submit a video of a short PowerPoint presentation – kind of like Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth slide show. It will be called an “Inconvenient Lie – the Bush Whitehouse”.

I really enjoy a good political meeting. I go to my local town hall meeting occasionally just for the entertainment value. They should change the name of the meetings to “egohall meetings”. What ever happened to the democratic political idea of the politicians taking the time to listen to the people that voted them into office? Or maybe that’s the problem, that there are so few people that vote today, that they only need to listen to themselves (they always vote for themselves) and the few friends that voted for them? I’d write more, but I have to go work on my video submission for the debate.

“YouTube Passes Debates to a New Generation”
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: June 14, 2007

Click on this link to view a video of a great presentation on how NOT to use PowerPoint!

Why meetcom.com? Because meetings do not have to suck. Meetings are a critical organizational tool in almost every corporation, but when you ask people about the meetings they must attend, most people say “I hate going to meetings, they are usually a big waste of time”.

In today’s fast paced business environment time is in short supply. Add to that the google amount of information that changes as fast as you can hit “new search”, meeting communications have become more challenging and critical to the success of an organization.