The Hamster Revolution for Meetings: How to Meet Less and Get More Done - Rilegato

Song, Mike; Halsey, Vicki; Burress, Tim

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1605090077 ISBN 13: 9781605090078

Casa editrice: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009

Riassunto

Are meetings taking over your life? You’re not alone. Meet Iris, a sales director so overwhelmed by meetings that she feels like a hamster on a wheel—in fact, she’s turned into one. Just in time, she meets a coach—a leading meeting efficiency expert—with a simple system that helps her regain her sanity and humanity.

The coach’s secret is a laser-like focus on the five biggest meeting pain points:

1. Meeting overload: Professionals waste twenty-four days a year in useless meetings.

2. Missing success ingredients: ninety percent of all professionals attend meetings that lack a clearly stated objective and agenda.

3. Virtual-meeting chaos: Disinterested participants + endless technical glitches huge amounts of wasted time.

4. Agenda adrift: Goals are missed when meetings veer off course.

5. Action distraction: Incomplete action items result in delayed projects and missed deadlines.

The coach demonstrates that these five challenges are damaging Iris’s career and costing the world over a trillion dollars each year. He provides practical new solutions that rapidly transform Iris from victim to victor. These solutions are tailored to the technology-driven world in which Iris lives—she discovers how to use e-calendars, PDAs, and virtual meetings to make her life easier, not more complicated. She applies the solutions, gets immediate results, and reclaims her life. The Hamster Revolution for Meetings focuses on a small number of high-impact best practices that really work. Included is a landmark case study that shows how 3,000 Capital One associates reclaimed ten days per year while improving meeting effectiveness by over 35 percent.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Mike Song is a gifted productivity speaker and bestselling author. His appearances on CNN, Good Morning America, and CNBC have helped millions of professionals reclaim their lives and get more done.
Vicki Halsey is vice president of applied learning at the Ken Blanchard Companies. She is regarded as one of the pioneers of leadership research in the information management industries and has consulted with the likes of Nike, Oracle, Gap, KPMG, and Wells Fargo.
Tim Burress is president of Cohesive Knowledge Solutions, Inc., and a highly skilled meeting effectiveness speaker and trainer. He is one of the nation’s most creative and innovative instructional designers. His clients include Capital One, McDonald’s, Mercedes-Benz, and Novartis.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

STUCK!

We were stuck.

Kim, our flight attendant, had just informed us that a violent thunderstorm was rapidly rolling in.

“If we get seated quickly, we’ll be able to take off a few minutes early and miss the bad weather,” she said.

Unfortunately, one final passenger was arriving at the last possible minute, spoiling the plan. Everyone was grumbling and straining to see who it was.

2
“Uh, welcome aboard!” said Kim, sounding confused. She was talking to someone, but from our vantage point, no one appeared to be there.

What was going on?

Kim turned to watch the invisible passenger trudge down the aisle. At the front of the plane, heads turned and people gasped.

“Did you see that?”

“Oh my!”

Straining to see, I leaned into the aisle to get a better look. Suddenly I was face-to-face with an attractive yet extremely frazzled female hamster. She was no more than two feet tall and wore a dark blue business suit.

My fellow passengers were stunned. The plane fell silent.

“Hi, I’m Iris,” she gasped. “I just ran all the way through the airport.”

A shocked-looking businessman across the aisle said, “You’re a…a…”

“Late, I know,” said Iris apologetically as she motioned to the empty seat next to me. “That’s mine.”

After stowing her computer case, she hopped into her seat and buckled in.

Iris seemed to sense the stares of her fellow passengers.

“Sorry everyone, I was in a meeting that ran way over,” she announced tersely. “And my twins, it’s their birthday tomorrow and I had to make this flight.”

Kim reviewed the safety instructions as our plane backed slowly away from the gate.

Glancing over at Iris, I said, “Meetings can suck the life out of you.”

“Tell me about it,” she replied. “This one was hideous.”

3
“How so?”

“It was a presentation to some of our top execs for a major productivity initiative—the most important thing I’ve ever worked on.”

“So what went wrong?” I asked.

“Everything,” groaned Iris. “It started late and veered into total chaos. David, my assistant, couldn’t get the LCD projector working and no one wanted to follow the agenda.”

She looked up, shut her eyes, and grimaced as if she was replaying every painful minute in her mind.

“This was a productivity project?”

“Operation Elevation,” said Iris sarcastically as she glanced out the window. “We’re transitioning 500 colleagues from our corporate headquarters to home offices in order to eliminate commute time and building costs.”

“I’ve heard about this,” I said thoughtfully. “You’re improving work/life balance, boosting productivity, and helping the environment. Don’t they call it home-sourcing?”

Iris gave a glum nod. “The benefits are endless. If we do it right, we save over $10 million a year. If we do it wrong—and our people can’t adapt—we lose millions!”

“Feeling a bit of pressure?” I asked.

“A ton of pressure,” corrected Iris. “My stomach’s been in knots for weeks.”

“And today’s meeting was critical?”

“Yes,” said Iris. “It was my first meeting with the top brass. I was so excited when the CEO picked me to lead the team.”

She let out a heavy sigh.

“Now it feels like Operation Quicksand! It was supposed to take my career to the next level—not bury it. If our next meeting is anything like this one, I’m pretty sure they’ll replace me.”

4
For a moment Iris seemed lost in her thoughts as she stared out the window. Storm clouds were rolling in from the west.

“What exactly do you do, Iris?” I asked.

“National sales manager at Spex Media,” she replied. “We design and deliver large multimedia events for product launches.”

Iris turned toward me with a slightly suspicious look. “You sure ask a lot of questions. What do you do for a living?”

“Sorry for prying. I’m a productivity coach—I help busy people get more done.”

Iris looked skeptical. “How?”

“For example, I help them get control of meetings.”

“Hah!” said Iris, dismissing the idea with a wave of her paw. “We tried that. We had a big meeting initiative last year. All our managers went off-site for a two-day training session.” She gestured thumbs down. “None of it stuck.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps there was too much information. Maybe we didn’t focus enough on what the facilitator was saying.

“We made all these big plans. But when we got back to the office there were mountains of email and overdue projects. The whole thing wasn’t very…”

“Practical?” I suggested.

“Yup,” said Iris. “And it didn’t mesh with the way we work. Spex meetings have changed in the past few years.”

“How?”

“They’re less formal and more virtual,” said Iris. “We do lots of teleconferences, and most of the stuff we learned didn’t apply to virtual meetings. Also, our leaders didn’t have time to create elaborate agendas or establish ground rules at every meeting.”

“Did it help you reduce unnecessary time spent in meetings?”

5
Iris laughed. “No way. We’re meeting more than ever and getting less and less done.”

She closed her eyes and put her head in her paws. “It’s hopeless. Operation Elevation is a mess and I’m doomed to run from one chaotic, dead-end meeting to another like a, a…”

She paused and gave me an exasperated look.

“Hamster on a wheel?” I offered.

“That’s it!” cried Iris, bolting up in her seat. “It’s like I’m running in place and never getting anything accomplished. And when I’m in a meeting, I often feel like I’m trapped in a, a…”

“Hamster cage?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed. She lowered her voice and whispered, “I’m sick of feeling like a hamster all the time.”

It occurred to me that Iris had no idea she had actually morphed into a hamster. Perhaps the transformation had been so gradual she hadn’t noticed.

The plane hesitated on the runway.

The pilot announced, “We’re going to be delayed a bit longer since we didn’t get that early start. It looks like the storm may pass to the north, but traffic control is asking us to wait a few more minutes.”

Several passengers groaned and some even glared at Iris. She slumped in her seat.

“Look, Iris,” I said. “Since we’re going to be sitting here for a while, maybe I can help you with your meeting challenge.”

Iris looked around as if she was searching for another place to sit.

“I appreciate it—but as I said, we’re hopeless.”

She glanced out the rain-streaked window and sighed. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

6
“What do you mean?” I asked.

“My career—my life,” she replied. “I always pictured this amazing job where people worked together and achieved a ton each day.”

“What did you think your meetings would be like?” I asked.

Her whiskers twitched as she considered. “For some reason I thought that each meeting would have a clear purpose, structure, and a set of follow-up actions that people would complete before the next meeting. I guess I saw them as places where people energized each other and did their best thinking. You know—got fired up and charged forward with renewed focus. I pictured myself coming home to my husband and the twins feeling relaxed and satisfied that I had contributed and accomplished a lot.”

Shaking her head sadly, Iris added, “I never thought I’d spend my days running from one lousy meeting to the next, feeling like a stressed-out hamster!”

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1605090077
• ISBN 13: 9781605090078
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 168
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile