Transcripts

Robert Kriegel:
And the problem is there are too many meetings, they're too long and they never accomplish too much.

Robert Kriegel, author of the book, How To Succeed In Business Without Working So Damn Hard says there are ways to get people out of un-productive meetings.

One is cut every meeting in half in terms of duration and frequency. So you've got an hour staff meeting every week make it a half an hour biweekly. And I've had more resistance initially from managers, "Oh, we can't do that, it won't work." I said try it for a month, see what happens. All of them say you know, now they only have forty-five minute meetings instead of hour and a half, they have it every other week, they get more done, boom they're more productive. Another thing we do is a vertical meeting; boom no chairs it cuts meeting time down at least a third.

Another problem is that virtually all meetings start late.

From a survey we did, that's usually about 12 minutes. That means you're valuing the latecomers so what we do is 10:00 meeting 10:01, doors locked that's one thing that was very effective. Another thing that was very effective was we charge a dollar a minute for everybody that comes late.

And Robert says we waste a lot of time duplicating our work.

I send you an email then you know what I do I call you I leave a voice mail to make sure you got the email and then I send you a hard copy. You know, duh, you know how about doing one or the other.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.