I’ve read a lot of articles about what a waste of time meetings are. Gary Vaynerchuk suggests we cut our meetings in half. Dan Kim calls recurring meetings “soul sucking, brain-draining, (and) pointless.” Both of them suggest the remedy is fewer, or shorter (or both) meetings, to reduce the wasteful salary expense of unproductive meetings.
They have a point. At Arizona State University (my employer) every purchase expense must be justified by a public purpose that is scrutinized my multiple layers of bureaucracy. That means that a $20 book, or a $2 box of white board markers, will consume hours of supervisory paperwork and approvals.
But anyone can schedule a $2000 meeting!
The internal bureaucratic mechanisms of cost control don’t apply to meetings, so it makes sense that meetings might be scheduled way past the point of diminishing returns… while none of the white board markers work.
Still, both GaryV and Dan Kim fail to recognize that communication is what constitutes an organization. For example, the days of geographical, supply chain, distribution channel, or economies of scale monopolies are over. Every organization must compete on the basis of creativity and innovation because we live in an age when all business value is ultimately traceable back to knowledge. Creating, sharing, organizing, and monetizing that knowledge requires communication. And face-to-face (F2F) meetings are still the highest quality, broadest bandwidth form of communication available.
Given the essential role of communication in your organization, what will replace these unproductive meetings once you’ve implemented the popular advice?
Read the full article @ Medium
Image from the original article
