Meeting Purpose: Make a Decision

Guy Kawasaki’s fundamentals for conducting a meeting really hit home. All meetings should be conducted with an end in mind. Prior to last class, I (shamefully) had conducted many ill-fated meetings which got nothing accomplished. I now realized that my meetings were victimized by a lack of understanding the basic purpose for having meetings: to make a decision.

The thing that really stuck for me was an inference I made from: for a meeting to be truly effective, the majority of the work must be done before the meeting actually starts. In order to make an informed decision in 30 minutes, all parties attending must have received a detailed agenda, and have enough time to gather their thoughts on the topics to be discussed. Without the full cooperation of all participants, the proverbial wheel will have to be re-invented and time is wasted.

This actually works! Last week, I limited my weekly 60 minute meeting to 30, sent out a detailed agenda with talking points assigned to the relevant parties, and informed all those to attend of the single purpose of the meeting: To make a decision on XXXX. The decision was made within the first 10 minutes of the meeting. Needless to say, I found Guy Kawasaki’s insight extremely helpful.