q had ten hours of staff meetings each week. They could have been done in two.

2. Attendance: Only those people should attend that have to present, approve, provide direct input to the process or perhaps are in training. No one else should be there. One of my people at Compaq got computer scheduled to a meeting of thirty people who sat around talking for twenty minutes only to find out they were waiting o

"Is there a point here or are we just being beat by a blunt object?" One of my direct reports spewed that out like a bad dinner coming up after a night of drinking. It wasn’t the most politically correct thing to say to the McKinseyite’s leading the meeting but it was effective. It was about like tossing a hand grenade on the table. It took place during the height of our change efforts at Compaq in the mid-nineties. Change was everywhere but nothing was changing ... we were in a meeting!

The number of meetings you experience will be in direct proportion to the rate of change someone is trying to drive. And the rate of meetings pick up in proportion to how far behind you are in the change process. As the rate of change increases so do the number of participants in the meetings. Of course you can predict the effectiveness, as well, zero.

Compaq was into online scheduling. When I joined the company I was immediately booked solid in meetings for three weeks. I asked Kelly, my Admin Assistant, what was with all the meetings? She said calmly, "Welcome to Compaq, where we're 'Meetings R' Us'. She wasn’t kidding. After three weeks of really meaningless meetings I pulled myself from the online meeting program. You actually had to talk with me to get a meeting, a novel concept.

So what can you do about it? Here are a few points that will save your sanity and a boat load of time.

1. Purpose: Every meeting must have an outcome stated upfront or you don’t go. Yea, you'll probably have to sit through some boring meetings with your boss that have no purpose but beyond that ... demand a purpose up front. My boss at Compaq had ten hours of staff meetings each week. They could have been done in two.

2. Attendance: Only those people should attend that have to present, approve, provide direct input to the process or perhaps are in training. No one else should be there. One of my people at Compaq got computer scheduled to a meeting of thirty people who sat around talking for twenty minutes only to find out they were waiting on

ties. Change was everywhere but nothing was changing ... we were in a meeting!

The number of meetings you experience will be in direct proportion to the rate of change someone is trying to drive. And the rate of meetings pick up in proportion to how far behind you are in the change process. As the rate of change increases so do the number of participants in the meetings. Of course you can predict the effectiveness, as well, zero.

Compaq was into online scheduling. When I joined the company I was immediately booked solid in meetings for three weeks. I asked Kelly, my Admin Assistant, what was with all the meetings? She said calmly, "Welcome to Compaq, where we're 'Meetings R' Us'. She wasn’t kidding. After three weeks of really meaningless meetings I pulled myself from the online meeting program. You actually had to talk with me to get a meeting, a novel concept.

So what can you do about it? Here are a few points that will save your sanity and a boat load of time.

1. Purpose: Every meeting must have an outcome stated upfront or you don’t go. Yea, you'll probably have to sit through some boring meetings with your boss that have no purpose but beyond that ... demand a purpose up front. My boss at Compaq had ten hours of staff meetings each week. They could have been done in two.

2. Attendance: Only those people should attend that have to present, approve, provide direct input to the process or perhaps are in training. No one else should be there. One of my people at Compaq got computer scheduled to a meeting of thirty people who sat around talking for twenty minutes only to find out they were waiting o

ctiveness, as well, zero.

Compaq was into online scheduling. When I joined the company I was immediately booked solid in meetings for three weeks. I asked Kelly, my Admin Assistant, what was with all the meetings? She said calmly, "Welcome to Compaq, where we're 'Meetings R' Us'. She wasn’t kidding. After three weeks of really meaningless meetings I pulled myself from the online meeting program. You actually had to talk with me to get a meeting, a novel concept.

So what can you do about it? Here are a few points that will save your sanity and a boat load of time.

1. Purpose: Every meeting must have an outcome stated upfront or you don’t go. Yea, you'll probably have to sit through some boring meetings with your boss that have no purpose but beyond that ... demand a purpose up front. My boss at Compaq had ten hours of staff meetings each week. They could have been done in two.

2. Attendance: Only those people should attend that have to present, approve, provide direct input to the process or perhaps are in training. No one else should be there. One of my people at Compaq got computer scheduled to a meeting of thirty people who sat around talking for twenty minutes only to find out they were waiting o

lly had to talk with me to get a meeting, a novel concept.

So what can you do about it? Here are a few points that will save your sanity and a boat load of time.

1. Purpose: Every meeting must have an outcome stated upfront or you don’t go. Yea, you'll probably have to sit through some boring meetings with your boss that have no purpose but beyond that ... demand a purpose up front. My boss at Compaq had ten hours of staff meetings each week. They could have been done in two.

2. Attendance: Only those people should attend that have to present, approve, provide direct input to the process or perhaps are in training. No one else should be there. One of my people at Compaq got computer scheduled to a meeting of thirty people who sat around talking for twenty minutes only to find out they were waiting o

q had ten hours of staff meetings each week. They could have been done in two.

2. Attendance: Only those people should attend that have to present, approve, provide direct input to the process or perhaps are in training. No one else should be there. One of my people at Compaq got computer scheduled to a meeting of thirty people who sat around talking for twenty minutes only to find out they were waiting on the person who called the meeting. My guy later found out he was scheduled to be at this meeting in error.

3. Time: When you start the meeting assign a timekeeper. Decide in advance how long it should take and don’t go over by one minute. On one consulting/turnaround gig we did the CEO routinely, as in every single meeting, came in and dominated the conversation causing a one hour meeting to run to three and four and many times they ran into the night. It was awful. No one but me would tell him (privately mind you), how rude it was to takeover and dominate meetings and be so disrespectful of another’s time. He didn’t listen but I told him.

4. Subject: At the start of a meeting you assign a gatekeeper. That is the person that tells the others, "You are off target, that's not the 'purpose' of this meeting. You've all been in meetings where you end up trying to solve world hunger and never get to the topic at hand. The Gatekeeper's job is to insure that doesn’t happen.

When you run a meeting, make sure those four things happen. Make sure there is a purpose, the right people are there, you adhere to the time and you stay on course. There is no other way to survive the tyranny of meetings during change.

The choice is yours. Do you want to waste your life in meetings or do you want to do something about it. It was so bad when I was at Compaq during my ten hours of staff meetings weekly, I wrote a small book. It's called A Dozen Things I Learned About Life as a Marine Sniper in Vietnam. It was fun. It was that or slit my wrists. My boss came by one time and said, "My you take a lot of notes." I smiled and sai