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At start of meeting with a poor service provider their Director stands up and says “I will write on the board everything we do for you because otherwise you will not understand how complex and time consuming it is”. I let him write for about five minutes, finally interrupted his lecture and told him they do not do any of these things for us. This resulted in 10 minutes of shouting by the Director at members of his team. Not awkward at all…
Lets spend countless hours preparing for a meeting that will be delayed, canceled, or misrepresented.
The “Where” field is the location of the meeting you moron!
I remember a phone meeting when someone forgot to put his/her phone on mute and was on the “bathroom break” at the same time. Start to imagine.
After hosting an online meeting, it’s usually a good idea to turn off screen sharing before surfing the web. Yikes.
“Ever have that déjà vu feeling?” Yes, every Monday at 9am.
My biggest problem with meetings is that people who are attending/running them don’t often think about how much they cost. People are expensive and there are far too many meetings that have far too many people in them that don’t need to be there.
Another big problem I see is when meetings get so large that a second meeting starts taking place inside the initial meeting. Usually these meetings are only for the benefit of a few people but everyone else has to sit their listening to them. Take that offline!
I personally love your doodles of your co-workers disguised as aliens/demons/monsters. Not sure they like it much, though. Maybe you should CLOSE your notebook next time you step out of the room.
An “after-hours” meeting where only your boss and the CEO were invited to discuss the progress on the “high priority” project of the month, only to have every VP and higher show up, including one “advisor” who doesn’t even work for the company but manages to side-rail the presentation every minute with a stupid question.
A meeting where a coworker dozes off sometimes is expected… now when the coworker starts to snore aloud, that is a sign your meeting really sucks. Don’t make your meeting suck.
“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate” – Dave Barry (American Writer and Humorist)
I read that Michael Bloomberg never allowed chairs in conference rooms while running Bloomberg. This made everyone want to get out of the meeting as quickly as possible. I have since thought the idea of having standing room only meeting rooms was brilliant, but haven’t had the chance to build my own. I will get that opportunity soon enough:)
I remember one meeting where the presenter actually did a pretty good job. He even included a meaningful demo of his web application. Too bad he forgot to clear his google search history, as everyone started giggling at “pictures of jessica alba”. I just thanked God he wasn’t using *my* laptop…
I am certain that some meetings are held merely to hide the fact that some managers are unprepared to execute on projects that have been weeks in planning.
“I think some meetings are designed to break the spirit of employees.” – @SergioValenCo via Twitter
OMG #3hourconferencecall
From the “Never Fedex your proposal to UPS” category, I just sat through a virtual demo using a competitor’s online meeting platform. At least the salesperson admitted: “I guess I should be using SalesCrunch for this demo.” My response: “Only if you want our business.”
If you put a Malcolm Gladwell quote in your deck, I know it’s time to check out and read my email.
Every time we have this pointless meeting, I die a little inside :-/
We don’t care about your kids or pets or your ski trip. Can we just get to the point so I can get some real work done?
When the boss said, “Put your phones on silent,” he meant silent, not vibrate.
Get to an online demo with an important customer and spend the first 20 minutes downloading WebEx. Realize that the customer is frustrated and doesn’t have the sufficient time to discuss your product. He tells you that it will be best to reschedule, but doesn’t give you a definite time. “Give me a call next week and we’ll set something up.” Right, the first meeting took 3 months to setup. Hang up the phone, and cry.
My favorite meetings at my last job were the ones in which we spent 50 minutes discussing the previous week’s action points but only 10 minutes discussing what needed to get done. That CEO didn’t make it to his 1-year anniversary with our company.
Thank god I have meetings scheduled all day. I can’t possibly be doing any thinking because I’m so hungover.
That’s an incredible blouse, and you fill it out quite nicely, but each button you leave open is another reason why I’m taking my business elsewhere – just sayin’.
