Death By Meetings - Leveraging IT to Save Time
I stumbled across an interesting Seth Godin post on the problem with meetings. He offers up 9 suggestions on making meetings better.
The larger problem with corporate culture is the insidious issue of people not doing their job. So meetings are required to direct people in real time on what they need to do, what they need to be thinking about and what the end game should be. Gone are the days of self-initiative. Goodbye to the self starter.
Meetings are now to make sure people do what they are supposed to do. Then you meet again to make sure they've done what they said they would do.
Gaahhh!
Sure, it's good to talk about projects in real time, it's nice to be in sync. There are a plethora of IT tools that manage both of these activities much better than what can be accomplished in an hour meeting. Unfortunately there's still an underlying fear of collaboration tools, and some folks are just plain too lazy to learn and experiment with them. Hey - I'm in the lazy boat too on some activities.
My Outlook Personal folder is 2.8 GB. It's how I store stuff and stay organized. It's an admitted critical flaw of mine. I'd love to port my work and projects over to an interface that is shareable and collaborative. My company provides some fairly reasonable tools to achieve this --- but I'm spending too many hours in meetings to find any free time to embrace some of these IT initiatives ;-) We've got wikis, we've got a sharepoint server. Heck - we've even reached out and embraced blogging! Still. In the grand scheme of things, it's just easier to have a meeting ;-)
Technorati Tags: IT, Seth Godin, Outlook, Wiki, Sharepoint
The larger problem with corporate culture is the insidious issue of people not doing their job. So meetings are required to direct people in real time on what they need to do, what they need to be thinking about and what the end game should be. Gone are the days of self-initiative. Goodbye to the self starter.
Meetings are now to make sure people do what they are supposed to do. Then you meet again to make sure they've done what they said they would do.
Gaahhh!
Sure, it's good to talk about projects in real time, it's nice to be in sync. There are a plethora of IT tools that manage both of these activities much better than what can be accomplished in an hour meeting. Unfortunately there's still an underlying fear of collaboration tools, and some folks are just plain too lazy to learn and experiment with them. Hey - I'm in the lazy boat too on some activities.
My Outlook Personal folder is 2.8 GB. It's how I store stuff and stay organized. It's an admitted critical flaw of mine. I'd love to port my work and projects over to an interface that is shareable and collaborative. My company provides some fairly reasonable tools to achieve this --- but I'm spending too many hours in meetings to find any free time to embrace some of these IT initiatives ;-) We've got wikis, we've got a sharepoint server. Heck - we've even reached out and embraced blogging! Still. In the grand scheme of things, it's just easier to have a meeting ;-)
Technorati Tags: IT, Seth Godin, Outlook, Wiki, Sharepoint