Some people seem to thrive on meetings -- for the most part, they are the ones who talk the most and relish any attention they receive. But most of us hate them and resent any attendance requirement.
Maybe for that reason -- call it bias confirmation if you want -- it's always fun to read articles criticizing meetings. The toon in the margin came from the July 11, 2018, print edition of the Wall Street Journal.
Here's the one that inspired this blog post: Tortured by meetings. Excerpt:
One eternal problem has been their inefficiency. In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson, an academic and legendary writer on management, came up with the law of triviality, that “the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved.” In that same spirit, this columnist would like to propose an even broader principle, applying to gatherings of ten people or more, and immodestly called Bartleby’s Law: “80% of the time of 80% of the people in meetings is wasted.”
Various corollaries to this law follow. After at least 80% of meetings, any decisions taken will be in line with the HIPPO, or “highest-paid person’s opinion”. In short, those who backed a different outcome will have wasted their breath. Perhaps because they are aware of the futility of their input, fewer than half of the people in a large meeting will bother to speak and at least half of the attendees will at some point check their phones.
I'm surprised that most are not staring at their phones the entire time. But here's why the meetings are still with us:
Part of the problem lies in the paradox that, although workers hate attending meetings, they loathe being excluded even more. Nothing is so likely to induce paranoia than a department meeting to which you are not invited. To avoid this fear, managers are tempted to invite as many people as might be interested.
Read the whole thing to see tips on how to hold successful meetings. The best tip came from General Electric CEO, John Flannery, who suggested: “little or no meetings where possible”.
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1:56 PM 7/11/2018
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