Tag: Al Pittampalli

Meeting math

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Not so long ago I strong-armed a bunch of my co-workers into reading one of the Domino books,  Read This Before our Next Meeting (free for Amazon Prime members).  The book is a diatribe against the meeting culture and all the associated time that’s wasted in poorly designed, poorly conceived, poorly run meetings.

It’s a book that you don’t necessarily enjoy reading, because the author, Al Pittampalli doesn’t care much if you like what he has to say, spending most of his energy hitting you over the head with anti-meeting diatribes without making the medicine go down too easily.

That said, the conclusions are hard to ignore: most meetings are inefficient, we are lazy about them, and we could be drastically more productive if we approached them differently.

My starting point is that we underestimate meeting time the way we underestimate the impact of copying 10 people on an email: it doesn’t feel like having 6 people in a 30 minute meeting is three hours of productive work that’s we’re using up.   But it is – so shouldn’t the organizer be obliged to spend at least a half hour of prep time each and every time he proposes to use 2.5 hours of his colleagues time?

The most aggressive suggestion in the book is that we should not use meetings to make decisions, we should use meetings to ratify decisions that have already been made.

The building blocks underneath that recommendation are: no meetings without prior agendas, no meetings without significant work done in advance by the meeting organizer, and no meetings without a proposed decision for the group to ratify.

Easy to say, but how often do we get a group together and someone says, “OK, we’re here to talk about…..”  That’s not the same as, “We’re planning to do _____, and this meeting is being called to ratify that decision.”

If that is the bar, you get a lot fewer meetings, a lot more preparation, a lot more time to do real work rather than sit in a room and talk.

(Bonus: the next time you get 20 people in the room for a 30 minute meeting, make sure you’re getting 10 hours’ worth of organizational impact out of that half an hour).

The whole without a map thing is not (just) a metaphor

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I was running a familiar four mile loop and decided I was feeling good enough that I’d extend the run.  Rather than take the final right turn a half mile from the “end” of the run, I kept going.  A half mile later, on an unfamiliar street not knowing exactly where I was or where I was going, I lost all my mojo.  My stride shortened, I felt the spring go out of my step, everything started to tighten up.

Was I actually, all of a sudden, so much more tired?

No, I was just off my map:  the calculus of where I was relative to where I had to go had stopped processing; I literally didn’t know if I was heading north or east; and I couldn’t tell if each step was taking me closer to or further from my destination.

I wasn’t tired, I was just disoriented.  And once I realized that, realized that the simple act of feeling lost had gotten into my head, not my legs or lungs, I exhaled and things felt better (though not completely back to normal).

There’s a lot of great advice out there that we find so appealing but we stop short of actually taking the advice – because it would be silly, wouldn’t it, to actually go all the way.  So we read and believe that success today comes the moment you recognize that there is no map, no path someone has charted out for you to follow.  And we think that’s a nice idea but do we actually, literally, practice what it feels like to be somewhere without a map, do we observe how we react to this situation and learn how to apply that reflection to our lives?

We read about radical email strategies that could save us hours a day (whether Leo Babuta’s email ninja tricks which include limiting all responses to 5 sentences or less, or experiments like ‘no email Friday,’ recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal) and we nod but then we just tweak things around the edges.

Someone suggests that we could shorten our meetings and change our meeting culture by having all meetings standing up or only holding meetings to support a decision that’s already been made and we think it’s a nice idea that wouldn’t really work for us and our company culture.

Maybe, just maybe, these ideas aren’t metaphors.  Maybe they are actual, real ideas.  And maybe nothing would go wrong if we actually tried them, for real, for a little while before rejecting them out of hand.

Go ahead, go for a walk or run this weekend without a map and see how it feels.

Free Kindle book – save your meetings

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A few years ago, I started a depressing Excel spreadsheet to track how many hours a day I was spending in meetings.  It was sobering.  Four, five, sometimes six hours a day.  When was I supposed to do real work?

It seems like an impossible problem to solve, but there may be a way.  Al Pittampalli has a new manifesto on how to save your company by rescuing it from death-by-a-thousand-meetings.  It’s called “Read this before our next meeting: The Modern Meeting Standard.”  You can read it in less than an hour, and it just might turn your company around.

Even better, it’s free for the next five days on Kindle, no strings attached.

Download here.

The first paragraph of the book:

Someone asked me the other day what I do for a living.  I found myself hard-pressed for an answer.  If he wanted to know my job title, or what industry I worked in, then all I had to do was recite what’s on my business card.  But he seemed sincere.  He honestly wanted to know what I do most of the day, so I was honest, too: What I do for a living is attend meetings.  Bad meetings.

Sound familiar?  Download the book for free.