Meeting Maniac?

I love a good meeting! But I guess I’m just a meeting maniac. It makes me crazy when people make blanket statements about meetings. For example, today I read “How NOT to Have Mind Numbing Office Meetings” by one of my favorite Social Media Gurus, @ChrisBrogan. He suggests that no meeting should last more than 10 minutes. I guess that he never would last in one of our 10-hour management meetings. Yes, I said 10 hours!

I believe that one of the reasons for eSlide’s success is that we take meetings very seriously. We’re a small company, but rarely have there been meetings in our history that did not include a written agenda and detailed notes. We attempt to have weekly update meetings and a detailed monthly management meeting. During our start-up phase, these meetings often lasted 10+ hours. They were sometimes intense, often exhausting, but we had many items we needed to work through – and our organized agenda (and yes slides) helped us to stay on track.

Although we communicate all day via phone, email, and internal chat application, we’ve found that it’s hard to beat the group brain power of a well-planned, focused meeting.

We learned the importance of a good meeting during our years of assisting executives in some of the most successful companies in the world. We’ve had a hand in developing slides that have acted as visual information guides for critical meetings – whether a board meeting of twenty, a company- wide meeting of thousands, or the launch of a new product to millions. They often have staff preparing for weeks, sometimes months in advance of these meetings. They plan every detail that can be planned. Although, it seems they often forget to plan for the time it takes to develop, design and produce the important PowerPoint visuals – which is why it is hard for us maintain our own meeting schedule! But since we see the powerful results of a good meeting, we remain totally committed to making the most of our own limited, but valuable meeting time whether it’s 10 minutes or 10 hours.