This Post could have been a Meeting The reason for bad meetings is not a lack of knowledge or discipline, but a lack of honesty and excess of tolerance for unproductive behaviour. This loss of productivity results in costs to any organization. Being bold about bad meetings helps to improve productivity. Recently we discussed meeting culture and discipline in one of our team off-sites. Participants unanimously agreed that there's significant potential in our organization to improve the efficiency of meetings. Start and finish on time, define a specific outcome, stay on track throughout the duration of the meeting and others were mentioned as key guardrails for efficiency. We're all familiar with them, yet we often neglect them. Improving meeting quality is one of the most effective ways to ensure people's time and resources are not wasted. Imagine you and I worked for the same organization and I would send you an arbitrary invitation for this topic with the following suffix...
Note to My Future Me If you're steering your organization with just one KPI, you're not managing. You're hoping. Before you read on, a quick warning: What follows might shift your perspective on organizations—maybe even radically. Turn back. Take the blue pill. Keep your beliefs unchanged - about your team, your department, your business unit, your company, your industry. Or keep reading…and risk taking off the frog goggles. And s ee things differently. You’ve been warned :-) Crash Course in Controlling When people hear the word “controlling,” they often think of numbers, spreadsheets, maybe men in gray suits with ties, horn-rimmed glasses, and little sense of humor—or the latest cost-cutting initiative (#travelpolicy). Others associate management and control with something more exciting: a Formula 1 car, the cockpit of a jumbo jet, or a conductor leading an orchestra. All of these associations are valid (although the “no humor in controlling” cliché has been tho...