Tag Archive for 'meetings'

How to politely respond to a cellphone in a meeting?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 9, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

Now that we live in a reality where we’re interrupted by a cellphone call a few times every hour, it is inevitable that people ring us even while we’re in an important business meeting. The question becomes, then, how do we react to the ring while remaining polite?

This was not a problem back in that ancient era – say, 25 years ago – when business people had something called an office, which had a door, and a secretary that could be asked not to transfer calls. But today we meet in coffee shops as often as in walled rooms, and secretaries are a rare breed. We need to decide what to do about interfering calls – which, of course, may involve important business in themselves.

There are many strategies to choose from:

  1. We can turn the phone off.
  2. We can leave it on but switch it to its Silent (“vibrate”) profile; then we can take a peek at the caller ID when we sense it coming to life and ignore the call unless it’s vital.
  3. We can let it ring audibly, taking a peek at the caller’s ID and hitting “reject” unless it’s vital.
  4. We can take one or two calls early in our meeting, and then turn it off or make it Silent.
  5. We can answer select calls, apologizing to the person we’re meeting with “Pardon, but this is important”, or “this is X, excuse me but I must take it” (where X is the wife, the kid’s kindergarten teacher, or the president of the United States – whoever we deem is unquestionably deserving in the other’s eyes).
  6. We can answer every single call, without so much as an apology.

So which strategy is best from an etiquette perspective? There is no one right answer. Sure, ideally you’d take option 1; after all, the caller will then leave a voice mail or Text you. But in the real world we juggle so many responsibilities that we may have a valid need to be reachable in case of a real emergency. The last option on the list is utterly rude, however many people adopt it. This leaves the middle four, which all combine a degree of screening with use of various degrees of silencing.

To my mind, what really matters is the perception of the person you’re with. Take option 4: the act of firmly turning the phone off after it rang a few calls says “Oh, this is really too much; my conversation with you is more important to me than these other people that are calling me“. In a sense it transmits a friendlier message than just coming to the meeting with the phone already off. Similarly, answering only calls from your wife (or the president) – and making sure to point out the caller – makes the other guy feel that maybe he’s not as dear to you as your spouse, but he’s is still above everyone else. It feels good.

I guess what this goes to is differentiation: you don’t answer the infernal device indiscriminately – you make it clear to the other person that some calls must come through, but only the really important ones you can’t defer; the rest you visibly reject because you have respect for your real life conversation and its participants.

As has been often remarked… it’s the thought that counts!

A blast from the past: weekly status updates

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 22, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

Periodic status reports are one area where you would do well to look for information overload improvement opportunities. In many organizations the network hums with daily reports, weekly reports, and monthly reports, often with large amounts of redundancy. Just take a critical look around you, or in the mirror…

But something reminded me the other day of an extreme example of such redundancy, going back to 1982. I had just joined Intel and relocated to Silicon Valley for some on-the-job training, and among the many wonders of the American Way I was introduced to a wonderful method of sharing status information within our team. Being new, I did not view it critically then; I was just amazed…

Here’s how this worked: every Friday a half dozen of us would get into a small conference room for a weekly team meeting. Each of us had written a weekly status report (with pen on paper, personal computers not having yet penetrated the corporate world) and photocopied six copies ahead of the meeting. Once in the room, we would hand around copies to our peers, so we each ended with a sheaf of everyone else’s reports. Then we’d take turns talking about the week’s events – basically lecturing what was written in our reports. This part was certainly useful, and since there were no laptops or blackberries to distract us with email, it led to real brainstorming and sharing. And then… then we’d all go back to our cubicles and throw all the paper into the large trash cans they contained.

Sounds silly? Oh yes, but again: take a look around you. To be sure, most of the traffic is electronic today, which may save trees (though don’t all those electrons come from somewhere too?) But the redundancy, and the senseless distribution of information without regard to actual need to consume it, these are still there. Who knows, maybe in a few decades someone will blog about it with retrospective derision too…

At last – a meeting cost calculator!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 24, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 3 Comments

Meetings consume precious time like a SUV guzzles gas. I remember that Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary co-founder, once wrote that you need half a dozen approvals to buy a $5000 copier but can call a meeting of 20 managers – whose time costs far more – without anyone raising an eyebrow. The fact is, the time cost of meetings is enormous and usually overlooked.

Now, time spent on a well led, interactive, lively meeting is very well spent; but all too often meetings are long, boring and useless, especially when everyone is doing email… and when they drag on, or get into a rathole, nobody hears the jingle of money rolling down the drain.

Until now. I was delighted when my friend Paul Calame sent me a pointer to the product pictured here: the TIM (Time is Money) Meeting Cost Calculator & Clock.

TIM meeting cost calculator

You set the TIM up by inputting the number of attendees and their average salary, and the display ticks away the dollars, reminding everyone that they’d better stay focused and fast.

This fun product can be found here, and in the spirit of our time it even has a Facebook fan page… and, appropriately enough, you can buy it at the online Dilbert store :-)

Meetings consume precious time like a SUV guzzles gas. I remember that Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary co-founder, once wrote that you need half a dozen approvals to buy a $5000 copier but can call a meeting of 20 managers – whose time costs far more – without anyone raising an eyebrow. The fact is, the time consumption of meetings is enormous and usually overlooked.

Now, time spent on a well led, interactive, lively meeting is very well spent; but all too often meetings are long, boring and useless, especially when everyone is doing email… and when they drag on, or get into a rathole, nobody hears the jingle of money rolling down the drain.

Until now. I was delighted when my friend Paul Calame sent me a pointer to the product pictured here: the TIM (Time is Money) Meeting Cost Calculator & Clock.

You set the TIM up by inputting the number of attendees and their average salary, and the display ticks away the dollars, reminding everyone that they’d better stay focused and fast.

This fun product can be found here, and in the spirit of our time is even a Facebook fan page for this product… and, appropriately enough, you can buy it at the online Dilbert store :-)

Meetings: Shorter is Better

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 13, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

Meetings consume a big portion of the knowledge worker’s week, and are notoriously unproductive (small wonder, what with everybody doing email). Improving meeting effectiveness is therefore a big deal; I’ve seen it done right with great positive impact, and the converse too. It takes some doing… but there is one way meetings can be improved immediately: by abandoning the tyranny of the one-hour slot.

Most meetings in the world are set for an hour or two, simply because we all live by the clock, and it is calibrated in hours. This is also reflected in most calendars, whether paper or software based. And so, most people have their calendar applications set for a default 1-hour meeting duration. I’m sure you’ve never seen an invitation for a meeting from 10:00 AM to 10:38 AM… even if 38 minutes would suffice, you set it for the full hour, then fritter away the remaining time. In addition to losing the “padding” time (which reminds me of the inefficient use of disk space for file storage in blocks, but hey, I’m a techie) – there is another issue: with many people in back to back meetings, there is no gap between meetings – and you do need a few minutes to go from conference room to conference room, or (even if it’s all on the phone) to summarize your notes and collect your thoughts; so meetings tend to begin late.

The solution, of course, is to shorten meetings to less than an hour. I’ve seen a number of approaches here:

  • Some companies simply use a 30 minute slot as the default. This makes for efficient meetings, though it leaves the gap problem unsolved.
  • At Intel we had a policy, driven by senior management, to set meetings for 50 minutes, allowing people to get to the next one in good time. It was not always adhered to, but it had an impact and helped instill a mindset of punctuality.
  • TimeBridge – makers of a wonderful meeting scheduling product I may discuss in a future post – have just announced the “45-Minute Meeting Movement”, an effort to help champion more efficient meetings. They have a blog you may want to keep an eye on; and they’ve made a change in their product by setting the default meeting time in the TimeBridge meeting scheduler to 45 minutes instead of sixty. This formalizes the previous idea, and should help users stay on track.
  • Of course, there’s the story of the company whose CEO had all the chairs removed from the conference rooms… a bit drastic perhaps but definitely conducive to brevity!

If you’ve witnessed other methods, let us know. Any tip in this space can save millions…

Meetings consume a big portion of the knowledge worker’s week, and are notoriously unproductive (small wonder, what with everybody doing email). Improving meeting effectiveness is therefore a big deal; I’ve seen it done right with great positive impact, and the converse too. It takes some doing… but there is one way meetings can be improved immediately: by abandoning the tyranny of the one-hour slot.

Most meetings in the world are set for an hour or two, simply because we all live by the clock, and it is calibrated in hours. This is also reflected in most calendars, whether paper or software based. And so, most people have their calendar applications set for a default 1-hour meeting duration. I’m sure you’ve never seen an invitation for a meeting from 10:00 AM to 10:38 AM… even if 38 minutes would suffice, you set it for the full hour, then fritter away the remaining time. In addition to losing the “padding” time (which reminds me of the inefficient use of disk space for file storage in blocks, but hey, I’m a techie) – there is another issue: with many people in back to back meetings, there is no gap between meetings – and you do need a few minutes to go from conference room to conference room, or (even if it’s all on the phone) to summarize your notes and collect your thoughts; so meetings tend to begin late.

The solution, of course, is to shorten meetings to less than an hour. I’ve seen a number of approaches here:

· Some companies simply use a 30 minute slot as the default. This makes for efficient meetings, though it leaves the gap problem unsolved.

· At Intel we had a policy, driven by senior management, to set meetings for 50 minutes, allowing people to get to the next one in good time. It was not always adhered to, but it had an impact and helped instill a mindset of punctuality.

· TimeBridge – makers of a wonderful meeting scheduling product I may discuss in a future post – have just announced the “45-Minute Meeting Movement”, an effort to help champion more efficient meetings. They have a blog you may want to keep an eye on; and they’ve made a change in their product by setting the default meeting time in the TimeBridge meeting scheduler to 45 minutes instead of sixty. This formalizes the previous idea, and should help users stay on track.

· Of course, there’s the story of the company whose CEO had all the chairs removed from the conference rooms… a bit drastic perhaps but definitely conducive to brevity!

If you’ve witnessed other methods, let us know. Any tip in this space can save millions…

Eliminating PowerPoint altogether: a brave experiment

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 20, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion and Organizational Solutions
. 3 Comments

I’ve discussed the shortcomings of thoughtless reliance on PowerPoint before. I was recently made aware of an audacious experiment tried out at Ashridge business school in the UK. As reported by Phil Anderson here, the purpose was “to see what the effect would be on us as learning and development professionals and more importantly how participants would find the experience, if PowerPoint was done away with all together and not a single slide was used”.

The effect, it turns out, was largely beneficial, and in ways beyond my immediate expectation. Not having PowerPoint forced the teachers to think more carefully about their message and how to convey it effectively. But it also enabled completely new ways of teaching it; for instance, teaching now involved the entire physical space of the room, not just a screen at one end. Teachers devised a variety of ways to engage their audience, which in turn reported a more enjoyable learning experience. As the article sums it up: “our experience has shown that presenting in other ways is liberating for both you as a presenter and your audience.” I like Liberating; it is a powerful scenario.

There are caveats, of course, and there are situations where judicious use of a presentation adds definite value. I myself prefer to use a mixed mode where I speak my mind, but  use slides to show images or diagrams that augment the audience experience. Not having any projected slides at all would probably be a bad idea in some cases, but in others it could lead me in intriguing and promising directions that I might never explore otherwise.

An interesting question that all this brings to my mind is what effect removing slides entirely would have on the distribution of speaking skills. Neither university professors nor corporate managers are selected on speaking talent; their abilities in this area must fall on a normal distribution. PowerPoint may be serving as an equalizer, making the good and the bad able to present in the same mediocre manner. My first guess is that removing PowerPoint would expose the innate variance in teaching skills, much more than the standard method does. That is, good teachers may do better than they had with PPT, while poor speakers will do much worse without the “crutch” it provides.

Where I’m really curious is how this might affect the very best speakers. Would they remain just as effective with or without slides? Would giving PowerPoint to Cicero or Demosthenes have made their speeches even more impressive, or would it have encumbered them? Perhaps they’d keep their excellence while speaking in a completely different style?

Thoughts, anyone?

He doesn’t DO PowerPoint!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 1, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 4 Comments

We should all learn from a senior corporate executive I know. This guy once participated in a meeting where half the attendees were in another geographic location, and were hearing our location via teleconference. At some point one of the people in the remote location asked “Are you showing any PowerPoint slides? Because we aren’t seeing them on our screen here”. And the exec said, emphatically:
“I don’t DO PowerPoint!”

I was overjoyed when I heard that. He didn’t do PowerPoint; instead, he talked to his audiences, explaining, instructing, directing, managing, leading, role modeling… all the things a manager ought to do, none of which really necessitates slide presentations.

Of course, PowerPoint and its like are useful; I use them myself, when the need arises. But I do my best not to make them the main thing; after all, a slide deck is but a support tool to help the speaker get the message across. Unfortunately this obvious truth is often forgotten. We’ve all sat drowsily through meeting after meeting where 80-slide presentations are droned through by one presenter after the other, to no conceivable use. The mind boggles at the accumulated effort and time invested worldwide in preparing snazzy slides (many of them quite confusing) and in listening to them being read mechanically. And the medium isn’t conducive to critical thinking, as pointed out by Edward Tufte in his insightful but sad booklet “The cognitive style of PowerPoint”, where he goes so far as to attribute the Columbia space shuttle disaster to the deficient managerial process triggered by the presentations used at NASA.

I myself had a jarring wakeup call years ago when our plant got a new training manager. The newcomer sat through a few meetings (we had lots of those) and told me “I don’t get it. Why do you guys read endless bullets from slides? Why can’t you just say what you want to say?”  This had a serious influence on my slidemanship from that day on… I began to use slides for pictures that would illustrate what I had to say, rather than for text to read from. It did my lectures a world of good.

So – next time you or those around you use PowerPoint, try to use it sensibly, like that exec I mentioned. Or at least try to avoid the style of the hilarious Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation (don’t miss slide 5 – it always cracks me up :-) ).

We should all learn from a senior corporate executive I know. This guy once participated in a meeting where half the attendees were in another geographic location, and were hearing our location via teleconference. At some point one of the people in the remote location asked “Are you showing any PowerPoint slides? Because we aren’t seeing them on our screen here”. And the exec said, emphatically: “I don’t DO PowerPoint!”

I was overjoyed when I heard that. He didn’t do PowerPoint; instead, he talked to his audiences, explaining, instructing, directing, managing, leading, role modeling… all the things a manager ought to do, none of which really necessitates slide presentations.

Of course, PowerPoint and its like are useful; I use them myself, when the need arises. But I do my best not to make them the main thing; after all, a slide deck is but a support tool to help the lecturer get the message across. Unfortunately this obvious truth is usually forgotten. We’ve all sat drowsily through meeting after meeting where 80-slide presentations are droned through by one presenter after the other, to no conceivable use. The mind boggles at the accumulated effort and time invested worldwide in preparing snazzy slides (many of them quite confusing) and in listening to them being read mechanically. And the medium isn’t conducive to critical thinking, as pointed out by Edward Tufte in his insightful but sad booklet “The cognitive style of PowerPoint”, where he goes so far as to attribute the Columbia space shuttle disaster to the deficient managerial process triggered by the presentations used at NASA.

I myself had a jarring wakeup call years ago when our plant got a new training manager. The newcomer sat through a few meetings (we had lots of those) and told me “I don’t get it. Why do you guys read endless bullets from slides? Why can’t you just say what you want to say?” This had a serious influence on my slidemanship from that day on… I began to use slides for pictures that would illustrate what I had to say, rather than for text to read from. It did my lectures a world of good.

So – next time you or those around you use PowerPoint, try to use it sensibly, like that exec I mentioned. Or at least try to avoid the style of the hilarious Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation (don’t miss slide 5 – it always cracks me up).

Leave your Blackberries at the door!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 29, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 1 Comment

Blackberries and other Smartphones have On/Off switches, and the ability to put them in Silent or Vibrate modes; yet few people have the presence of mind, or willpower, or even awareness, to use these capabilities when entering a location where the ringing and buzzing may be harmful – notably classrooms and meetings. Something stronger is required, and I saw it recently.

I went to give a workshop to a management staff at a large company, and I observed a delightful act of conscious control: when going into the room, everyone left their phones on a table at the door, placing each device on a piece of paper with the owner’s name on it to avoid confusion upon retrieval. Clearly this was standard practice with this staff; they, or their manager, had decided to put an end to handheld interruptions and surreptitious email checking, to enable a distraction-free meeting. Wayda go!…

I certainly recommend any team consider such a standard of behavior; all it takes is a firm manager and some peer pressure. One team that isn’t awaiting my advice is a team of some importance – US president Barack Obama’s cabinet. You can see here a photo of their hi-tech system for marking the devices, which must be left in a basket before entering the meetings. If they can do it, so can you!

The early bird gets nowhere

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 23, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms and Individual Solutions
. 2 Comments

People need some peace and quiet to be able to focus on creative work. Since in this age of the Blackberry interruptions are a constant disruption all day long, and endless meetings clobber one’s schedule, it follows that knowledge workers have two choices: either abandon all hope of doing seriously creative work, or try to find the required peace and quiet outside of the standard day. Some people do this late at night, although when you work at an international enterprise your evenings are likely to be spoken for due to intercontinental conference calls. Others go for the early morning.

The idea is simple: if your biological clock permits you to get up really early, you can come to the office at 6AM and have a couple of hours of peace to do your thinking work; I’ve known a number of managers who discovered this strategy. And it worked for them just fine – for a while. Then, their coworkers discovered that while these people were always busy during the formal work day, their calendar was nice and open from 6AM to 8AM – and they were awake and working! Once this secret came out, the poor early risers lost the advantage of quiet time and found their meeting-laden workday extended by an hour or two backwards, to their detriment and frustration…

You can run, but you can never hide, it seems – unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has the vision to address information overload and implement strict expectations that balance accessibility and the need for thinking time.

People need some peace and quiet to be able to focus on creative work. Since in this age of the Blackberry interruptions are a constant disruption all day long, and endless meetings clobber one’s schedule, it follows that knowledge workers have two choices: either abandon all hope of doing seriously creative work, or try to find the required peace and quiet outside of the standard day. Some people do this late at night, although when you work at an international enterprise your evenings are likely to be spoken for due to intercontinental conference calls. Others go for the early morning.

The idea is simple: if your biological clock permits you to get up really early, you can come to the office at 6AM and have a couple of hours of peace to do your thinking work; I’ve known a number of managers who discovered this strategy. And it worked for them just fine – for a while. Then, their coworkers discovered that while these people were always busy during the formal work day, their calendar was nice and open from 6AM to 8AM – and they were awake and working! Once this secret came out, the poor early risers lost the advantage of quiet time and found their meeting-laden workday extended by an hour or two backwards, to their detriment and frustration…

You can run, but you can never hide, it seems – unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has the vision to address information overload and implement strict expectations that balance accessibility and the need for thinking time.

The risk of doing mail in a meeting

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 30, 2009
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

Everybody “does mail” in meetings. These days it’s email, and earlier it was snail mail; whether the attendees sit with a glassy stare fixed on their notebook screens or they shuffle piles of paper, the impact on the meeting’s effectiveness is obviously negative. This is hardly new behavior… as a hilarious anecdote from ancient Rome illustrates. This is a true story, documented by Plutarch.

The attendee in question is none less than Julius Caesar himself, who was standing in front of the Roman senate, engaged in a debate with his arch-opponent Cato (the younger). Someone came in and delivered a letter to Caesar in the middle of the meeting, and he couldn’t resist reading it – much like a manager glancing at his BlackBerry screen today. Cato seized the opportunity and declared that this must be a letter from enemies of Rome and insisted it be surrendered and read. Caesar gave him the letter, and we can only imagine the strait-laced Cato’s indignant embarrassment when he read it to discover that it was a love letter from Servilia, Caesar’s mistress and mother to Brutus. It didn’t help that Servilia was Cato’s own sister…

Plutarch describes Cato’s reaction: he threw the note to JC with a curse and moved on. He doesn’t tell us what Caesar did, but I can imagine that – being anything but strait-laced – he must’ve rather enjoyed himself…

If you’re curious, here is the original story: It is said also that when the great conspiracy of Catiline, which came near overthrowing the city, had come to the ears of the senate, Cato and Caesar, who were of different opinions about the matter, were standing side by side, and just then a little note was handed to Caesar from outside, which he read quietly. But Cato cried out that Caesar was outrageously receiving letters of instruction from the enemy. At this, a great tumult arose, and Caesar gave the missive, just as it was, to Cato. Cato found, when he read it, that it was a wanton bit of writing from his sister Servilia, and throwing it to Caesar with the words “Take it, thou sot,” turned again to the business under discussion.