Yes, I attended another Webinar a couple of days ago, and picked up another idea on what not to do in online meetings. Do not ignore your participants’ questions! Sure, taking questions from the audience is a tricky subject – even in live, F2F meetings. Do you take questions as you go and allow the participants to interrupt your flow and drag you down some rat hole? Or do you wait until you are done with the main presentation and then take questions that require you to scroll bac ...     Read entire post

I was sitting at a local Starbucks the other day trying to listen in on an online meeting. It was a Wednesday morning when the local middle school starts late. My Starbucks got rapidly invaded by dozens of gigging pre-teens, and as the noise level got higher, my ability to do any work was gone. I can’t blame them – it was a coffee house after all, not my private office. Like most people, I can’t do all my work in a virtual world. I have to get out into the real world and int ...     Read entire post

Did you see the article on MSNBC? In a nutshell, the article claims that “groupthink” is actually less capable of making a good decision than each one of us individually. In other words, meetings make us dumber. I think I agree with this, but not 100%. I think it depends on the meeting and how prepared we are for it. We have all wasted a good portion of our lives in meetings that are poorly planned, have little or no agenda, no measurable goals and no clear focus. Add to it ...     Read entire post