Boring Meetings Suck: Get More Out of Your Meetings, or Get Out of More Meetings

Agenda Item 7

Big Meetings Suck Even Bigger… Get Some Help or Suffer the Consequences

No single activity in business is more impactful upon subordinates than holding a meeting that is engaging while being specifically targeted toward a company objective. No other activity in business can allow the C-Level executive to deliver a message, while following through with the social interaction so critical to today's workforce.

—Chris Curry, CEO, Destinations by Design, professional event management

For the most part, this book is about everyday office meetings and all the myriad ways they can go bad. With the fast-paced, complex nature of our times, we may well have a need for more meetings to share information, build consensus, and so on. Meetings help pull team members together to align with a single vision about how and why they'll succeed in their organizational endeavors.

Yet I'm not talking about your everyday office meeting in this section. It's about the large meetings that seek to bring the masses together and might include attendees from both within the organization and outside of it. These “big” meetings can be highly successful, and they are also highly visible to your boss and other executives. But because of their size, everything that sucks about a regular old meeting becomes amplified here. Even more than a project meeting get-together, the Big Meeting can quickly engulf time that should be spent doing your “real” job.

That holds true for those attending as well as those ...