35 Surefire Ways to Kill a Meeting
translates into how to run a meeting.
1. Play “find the meeting” by changing the location and time of your meeting at the last minute.
2. Don’t bother to book your meeting room in advance. Lead the group from room to room trying to find another place to meet.
3. Bring 5 handouts for 20 attendees.
4. Leave and say,35 Surefire Ways to Kill a Meeting Articles “I’ll be back. I’m going to make handouts.”
5. Don’t use an agenda because “everybody knows why we are here.”
6. Keep an attitude that “meetings are not work.”
”Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything. ”
lunchtime results
lunchtime result
– John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 – )
7. Say “I don’t need a microphone” and proceed to yell for the entire meeting or talk too softly for the back of the room to hear.
8. Combine two unrelated meetings into one big meeting, ensuring that half the will not care about half of the meeting.
“Soufflé is more important than you think. If men ate soufflé before meetings, life could be much different.”
Jacques Baeyens, French consul general in NYC
9. Don’t serve food during a lunchtime meeting.
10. Play “find a chair” at the beginning of the meeting due to inadequate seating.
11. Allow people to bring active pagers and cell phones and stop the meeting when one goes off.
12. Use visual aids no one can see without binoculars.
13. When you are finished, keep going just because the meeting was scheduled to take longer.
14. Invite Bozo the Facilitator to conduct your meeting.
15. Spend time trying to remember what happened at the last meeting.
16. Spend time arguing about what happened at the last meeting.
17. Refuse to take “off-line” conversations off line.
18. Fail to take minutes and follow up after the meeting.
19. Disband without summarizing the meeting.
20. Start over each time a latecomers arrives.