Quotations on meetings

Give your comments on the quotations below.

· A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted.

· Most meetings are a waste of time.

· Any simple problem can become unsolvable if enough meetings are held to discuss it.

· Bad meetings waste a fortune.

· A meeting without an agenda is like a journey without a map.

· People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

· Meetings are magnetic drugs that keep people from the tasks they were hired to perform.

· Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.

· The best way to be on time is to simply decide to be on time and to acknowledge that travel and meetings always take more time than originally anticipated.

C

Did you know?

Read the facts about meetings and discuss them with your partner.

· The average business person spends one third to one half of their working day in meetings.

· It is said that over 80% of the outcome of a meeting is decided before it takes place.

· A survey of 635 executives showed that the vast majority were bothered by the ineffectiveness of meetings they attend; for the following reasons: drifting off subject (83%), poor preparation (77%), not listening properly (68%), participants talking too much (62%), length (60%), participants not talking enough (51%).

· It has been estimated that the cost of a meeting is twice the basic salary of each participant.

· The average chief executive officer spends about 17 hours each week in meetings, senior executive 23 hours, and middle managers 11 hours.

· Companies waste almost 20% of their payroll on bad meetings.

· The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.

· A committee should consist of three men two of whom are absent.

· The Law of Triviality means that the time spent on any item on the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

· Surveys show that executives on average spend 40%-50% of their working hours in business meetings.

D

Do you agree?

1. The purpose of most meetings is to decide when the next one will take place.

2. A meeting is a group of people who can decide nothing alone, and who decide together that nothing can be done.

3. It’s better to send anyone a memo about a new procedure than to have a meeting about it.

4. Meetings help everyone to feel personally involved in decision-making.

5. It’s better for the boss to make a decision than to have a meeting.

6. The most important piece of paper at a meeting is the agenda.

7. Most meetings are unnecessary; they are just a way of making people feel important.

8. It’s better to talk to each person individually than to call them all together for a meeting.

9. A meeting may be the only chance the members of a group actually have to see each other face-to-face.

10. Meetings lead to better decisions, because of the exchange of information and ideas.

11. You can never rely on the person who takes the minutes to tell the truth about what actually happened at a meeting.

12. More time is wasted during the meetings than during any other business activity.

13. If a problem causes many meetings, the meetings eventually become more important than the problem.

Listen to the recording of Allan Case, an engineer, talking about the characteristics of successful business meetings. He makes five of the eight points below. Identify the correct order of these points.

E

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1377