Seth Also Says They Suck

By sheer coincidence, on the very day the first box of Boring Meetings Suck books was delivered to the door in Columbus, Ohio, Seth Godin posted about a breakfast he had with a senior executive who says they spend more than 30% of their time in internal meetings (Yikes! That number doesn't even appear to count EXTERNAL meetings!)

Seth shares his breakdown of the most common types of meetings:

Just so everyone knows:
This is a meeting in which one person or small group tells other people what's already been decided and is about to happen.

What are you up to:
This is a meeting in which every participant needs to present the state of their situation.

What does everyone think:
A meeting where anyone can speak up.

We need a decision right now:
These are ad hoc meetings with a specific agenda, ending with a decision. A final decision that doesn't get reviewed.

Hanging out meetings:
These are meetings with no real agenda, lots of side conversations, bored people, people instant messaging and just sort of hanging out.

To hear myself talk meetings:
You get the idea.

All (or at least most) of these meeting styles are covered in the Boring Meetings Suck book, but how could I pass up the Godin twist? Heck, he even supplied a few unofficial MSRDs (Meeting Suckification Reduction Devices) --

• Most meetings should be held without chairs. People standing up think more quickly and get distracted less often. And the meetings don't last as long.
  
• All day meetings should be banned.
  
• Meetings that attempt to accomplish more than one of the tasks above should be banned.
  
• Last person to walk in the door pays $10 to the coffee fund.
  
• Hire someone to come in and videotape a few of your standard meetings. Watch what happens.
  
• If there's someone senior in the group who comes to meetings, spouts off and then either changes his mind or doesn't take action, start asking people to sign in to meetings (with a pen) and then, when the meeting is over, sign out (with a pen) on a document that you create in the meeting that says what you did and what's going to happen next.

That advice is gold, I tell ya.... GOLD!
We're sending a copy of the book to Seth and adding his ideas to the MSRD arsenal in the next edition of Boring Meetings Suck.

In closing, how can you argue with how he finishes his post?
"If it's not worth doing this stuff, then I guess it's worth wasting 30% of your day."

Amen, brother!

This is Your Brain on PowerPoint

From Information Aesthetics...
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Research at the University of NSW in Sydney, Australia claims the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either verbal or written form, but not both at the same time. More of the passages would be understood & retained if heard or read separately.

"The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be ditched."

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind & decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."
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Meeting Suckification Reduction Devices:

• Don't put your speech verbatim as text on your PPT slides.
  
• Use charts, graphics, photos, and relate your spoken words to the images.
  
• Use picture book storytelling techniques -- have the narrative complement the illustrations.
  
• Think of it as reading a bedtime story to a youngster...
  You read the text and show the pretty pictures.

Crazy Awesome Slides

If you must add charts to your presentation slides, at least make them crazy awesome...




The guys from Threadless.com gave a presentation at Community Next and included this chart in their slide show that demonstrates their business model progression from "Sorta Awesome" to "Crazy Awesome" over the course of seven years.

While you're at it -- why not review their entire presentation? While they may possess the most polished oratory skills, they had rock-solid rapport with their audience and kept them engaged and involved throughout the entire 45-minute presentation.

That odd sound you hear in the background is LAUGHTER.
It sounds a lot differently from the SNORING in the background at your meetings.

Make Your PPT Slides STICK, Not SUCK

Courtesy of Lifehacker.com comes an idea for inserting a PPT slide that highlights your bulletpoints as sticky-notes.

Tech blogger Leisa Reichelt created a groupoing of Post-It notes containing her message, photographed it, then added it to her PPT file.

Nice idea~!