Business Insight Zone

Despite being a hard-bitten extrovert, I typically detest meetings and will go out of my way to avoid them. Why? Because they’re usually a waste of time. Startup company PayScale has taken this wisdom and run with it, as described in this TechCrunch post:

Time Is Money: Calculate The Real Cost Of Those Corporate Meetings

…The program, called Meeting Miser, calculates the a meeting’s cost down to the cents per minute. Meeting cost calculators are nothing new, but Meeting Miser incorporates real salary data from their site to tally the hourly cost for you….

This puts me in mind of a great (short!) article I read a couple of years ago. It’s a BusinessWeek Q&A interview with Simon Ramo, co-founder of TRW (now folded into Northrop Grumman) and the author of a book about meetings:

Why Most Meetings Stink
After attending 40,000 of them, 92-year-old business whiz Simon Ramo has a few tips

Q: I really liked the chapter on dozers and dozees, the people who doze off during meetings and the presenters who cause them to fall asleep. Any tips for dozers?

A: Almost everyone I know who has seen the book has felt compelled to comment about that chapter. If you attend enough meetings, it’s inevitable that you’ll doze off sometimes. Al Carnesale, the chancellor at UCLA, told me about the advice he got when he was younger: “When you wake up, don’t say ‘what?’ Say ‘why?”‘

Amen, sir.

Now, go and cancel a meeting!