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This is the classic! In "How to Make Meetings Work, Michael Doyle wrote a very useful and comprehensive book on guiding people on how to plan, organize and run effective and productive meetings. The book is well written in an easy to follow and understand style. It helped me to discard the notion that meetings are a waste of time and money and learnt how they can be very useful for an organization. Among the important tips that the author highlighted are the importance of having a clear agenda distributed in advance of the meeting, having a clear purpose of the meeting, clarity on the type of meeting being held (e.g. whether it is a planning meeting, for decision making, feedback etc), adequate preparation by all participants, participation in discussions by all those present at a meeting, importance of starting and ending on time, the need to stick to the agenda, summarizing action items and resolving conflicts that may arise. The book also provides insights into meeting leadership skills.

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

The status-update era is changing the annual performance review.


Peter and Maria Hoey
With many younger workers used to instant feedback-from text messages to Facebook and Twitter updates-annual reviews seem too few and far between. So companies are adopting quarterly, weekly or even daily feedback sessions.

Not surprisingly, Facebook Inc. exemplifies the trend. The social network's 2,000 employees are encouraged to solicit and give small nuggets of feedback regularly, after meetings, presentations and projects. "You don't have to schedule time with someone. It's a 45-second conversation-'How did that go? What could be done better?" says Lori Goler, the Palo Alto, Calif., social-networking company's vice president of human resources. More formal reviews happen twice a year.

For most companies, employee reviews are still an annual rite of passage. Some 51% of companies conduct formal performance reviews annually, while 41% of firms do semi-annual appraisals, according to a 2011 survey of 500 companies by the Corporate Executive Board Co., a research and advisory firm.

And increasing frequency may not make much of a difference if the performance appraisals are ineffective to begin with, say some. One academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies found that two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given. "Why is doing something stupid more often better than doing something stupid once a year?" asks Samuel A. Culbert, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the co-author of the book "Get Rid of the Performance Review!"

Some firms have found that the traditional once-a-year review is so flooded with information-appraising past performance, setting future goals, discussing pay-that workers have trouble absorbing it all, and inst

Teleconferencing is becoming extremely important to business in the 90's. Rising travel costs and a wide-spread emphasis on telecommuting will result in a dramatic increase in the number of teleconferences held each day.

Yet, unfortunately, the effectiveness of teleconferencing often fails to meet needs and expectation of telecommuters.

Meetings are an essential part of business and telecommuters still need to "meet". If they are meeting electronically, then we need to develop a methodology for facilitating distributed meetings. Running effective face-to-face meetings is difficult enough; managing effective telemeetings requires special training and tools.

TheVisual Telefacilitation Project at the Performing Graphics Company is researching ways in which visual representation can increase the effectiveness of teleconferencing. The technique currently being developed is the use of recorders for distributed meetings      visual telefaciltators      to provide a continuously updated record of the meeting discussion for all of the distributed participants.

Fred Lakein

There are good meetings and there are bad meetings. Bad meetings drone on forever, you never seem to get to the point, and you leave wondering why you were even present. Effective ones leave you energized and feeling that you've really accomplished something. So what makes a meeting effective? Effective meetings really boil down to three things: They achieve the meeting's objective. They take up a minimum amount of time. They leave participants feeling that a sensible process has been followed. If you structure your meeting planning, preparation, execution, and follow up around these three basic criteria, the result will be an effective meeting.

Selecting Participants Developing Agendas Opening the Meeting Establishing Ground Rules Time Management in Meetings Evaluating the Meeting Process Evaluating the Overall Meeting Closing the Meeting Lots of advice from a talkative MBA

Avoid a meeting if the same information could be covered in a memo, e-mail or brief report. One of the keys to having more effective meetings is differentiating between the need for one-way information dissemination and two-way information sharing. Like: after action report.

Our Work
Looking over the edge
Our work seeks to link the latest academic thinking from thought leaders across a variety of disciplines with the operational challenges and experiences of the members. The outcome is innovative service models, strategies, practices and standards that are operational.
To accomplish this, the Consortium hosts a number of activities the core of which are the Team Meetings. The Team Meetings are working sessions on specific topics. The speed with which the Consortium's work progresses is a function of the member's courage to try new and un-proven ideas. The Team Meetings are the place where we discuss these emerging ideas and learn from the members experiences.

When I ask Hamilton, skeptically, if it is possible to conduct a conventional business meeting in a virtual environment, he answers that of course you can - but why would you? He is convinced that the zaniness of virtual environments plus the steep learning curve of making your avatar function from a keyboard is an effective icebreaker, especially important when partners need to overcome differences in cultural traditions, languages, work ethics, and political systems in order to complete a project together. Second Life's oddities lend an improvisational quality to interactions that it's harder to achieve in formal business meetings. "Playing in a band I learned that you need to leave spaces for others to fill," Hamilton insists. "Given this opportunity, people step into the gap. Talented teams connect, commingle and co-create."

Note the variety of resources and dimensions on this site. "According to surveys by the Wharton Center for Applied Research, managers report that only 56% of their meetings are productive - and that 25% would have been more effective as conference calls, memos, e-mails, or voicemails

Interaction Associates white paper on virtual meetings

Ignite is a rapid-fire form of presentation. The presenter must present 20 slides in 5 minutes. Every 15 seconds a new slide advances automatically. It is amazing how much information one can cover in 5 minutes if you boil the message down to essence. It takes me longer to prepare a 5-minute Ignite session than a one-hour presentation. And I suspect people retain more information when I've finished, too. Talk about making meetings efficient. Watch some of these and give it a try.

Listen up, budding Masters of the Universe about to start boot-camp week at business school (and sign away $100,000 over two years). For all the wonderful instruction at places like Harvard, Wharton and my alma mater, the Stern School of Business at NYU, remember that making money involves so much more than columns in a spreadsheet and the ever shifting assumptions behind them. Keep in mind:

1. If it ain't broke, still fix it. One of the hardest decisions business owners have to make is turning their backs on cash when it's flowing. But that's exactly what you must have the courage to do at times to protect your franchise.

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2. Unless you end up at Goldman Sachs, forget what you learned about finance. "In a 12-year finance career with large respected companies," says one of my former classmates, who is finance chief for the unit of a large manufacturing firm, "I can count on two hands the number of IRR [internal rate of return], DCF [discounted cash flow] and NPV [net present value] analyses I have completed." He adds: "A career in corporate finance is nothing like what is taught in school. The job is largely to be the conscience of the business--expecting and demanding explanation for decisions and [being] well versed in most topics."

3. Take your financial models with a boulder of salt. "Too often people in business rely upon a model demonstrating projections out 15 to 30 years," says another biz-school mate, now a health care consultant. Really? In school we worked in more modest 3- to 5-year increments, with an understanding that anything beyond that was magical thinking. "Believe it or not," he went on, "I have seen some done out that far for deals [acquisitions] and often for public-private partnerships."

4. Overpromise and try to deliver. Underpromising and overdelivering may work on conference calls with Wall Stree

About Quantified Self
Are you interested in self-tracking? Do you use a computer, mobile phone, electronic gadget, or pen and paper to record your work, sleep, exercise, diet, mood, or anything else? Would you like to share your methods and learn from what others are doing? If so, you are in the right place. This short intro will help you get you oriented.

What is Quantified Self?
Quantified Self is a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking. We exchange information about our personal projects, the tools we use, tips we've gleaned, lessons we've learned. We blog, meet face to face, and collaborate online. There are three main "branches" to our work.

*The Quantified Self blog and community site. You are here! This is the central hub, where we keep track of all important goings-on, and you will soon be able to make connections, develop ongoing collaborations, and share detailed documentation of your personal projects.

I had intended writing a series of blog posts in the run up to the pilot launch of  The Smart Work Company's social learning platform in September. Turmoil in global financial markets, with the downgrading of the US credit rating and simultaneous shenanigans in the Euro zone, gives focus to the topics I want to explore.
The series, Smart Working in Turbulent Times, will include themes that I have talked about before in previous blog posts in a random way. My hope is that this series will pull topics together to create a rationale for smart working, to explore what it is, to make the case for why now (urgently) and to show how smart working practices can be enabled, drawing on researching new ways of working over a fifteen year period and years of practical experience of helping senior executives make the transition to new ways of working.
Themes
Off the top of my head, the themes will include:
What?
Context: turbulent times past and present - there are lessons
How organisations work (and don't) - relationship dynamics, power, culture, conflict, alliances, psychological needs, performance environments etc
Smart principles underpinning design for:
Viability (including emotional and psychological well-being)
Adaptability
Autonomy
Integration
Collaboration
Wirearchy
Distributed diversity
Collective intelligence
Social skills
Thinking skills
Leadership skills
Learning skills
Performance environments, including:
Cultural and social environment
Online place
Physical space
Whole system of leadership
How?
All this research and good practice that others have found effective in specific contexts and at specific times cannot be be copied or rolled out. What to do?
Draw out principles and interpret for your own situation
Create hypotheses about what is happening or what you want to happen
What might work?
What might enable or prev

Based on the experiments results I would like to recommend the following way forward (for my team, but likely for any team): Don't formalize narrating your work and don't make it mandatory. Many people commented that this is one aspect that they didn't like about the experiment. Focus on helping each other to turn narrating your work into a habit. I think it is important to set behavioural expectations about the amount of narrating that somebody does. I imagine a future in which it is considered out of the norm if you don't share what you are up to. The formal documentation and stream of private emails that is the current output of most knowledge workers in virtual teams is not going to cut it going forward. We need to think about how we can move towards that culture. We should have both a private group for the intimate team (in which we can be ourselves as much as possible) as well as have a set of open topic based groups that we can share our work in. So if I want to post about an interesting meeting I had with some learning technology provider with a new product I should post that in a group about "Learning Innovation". If have worked on a further rationalization of our learning portfolio I should post this in a group about the "Learning Application Portfolio" and so on.

So, after board meetings, we would assemble the company and go through every board slide. How much cash in the bank? What's our burn rate? What are the biggest problems we are facing? Did we decide to build, buy or acquire a critical component? The first couple of go-rounds, there was dead silence. No questions - just heads nodding and a couple of blank stares. After some probing, we realized that people needed to feel comfortable speaking up, that it didn't just come naturally. We brainstormed a bunch of different ways to get over this hurdle and here were some experiments that ultimately worked

Mind-blowing visualizing of teleconferencing from the past. Amazing how prescient people were.

Great worksheet on planning online community from Digital Habitats.