Three things . . .
. . . as I slump to the end of a tiring — but inspiring — week.
1. Quoth Bill James:
People take information and build knowledge. When you give them new information they will create new knowledge, absolutely and without question.
I take this seriously, not particularly in its baseball context, but because Hoover’s has worked hard for many years to bring high-quality, relevant information to businesspeople. All the time I’m thinking more about how we can do this better, not just in the sense of supplying information better and faster, but in the sense of helping you turn it into new knowledge that fuels your business.
That’s just a sketch of a much bigger idea — more to come.
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2. You may know that in many cases I’m a foe of business meetings, but I had a great one today. After I came out if it, I tweeted this, half in jest:
A good meeting is one you come out of with a hit list in hand.
After discussing it with a friend — who rightly stumped for the benefit of having a clear meeting agenda — I followed up with this:
Sharp clarity going in, severe clarity coming out should be the goal of a meeting.
If a meeting doesn’t exhilirate you, or scare you a little, or give you relief by answering some of your burning questions . . . what good is it?
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3. Something to think about if you find you’re having a hard time thinking:
The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. . . . Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day.
How can you improve your own attention? Or your customers’? Or your employees’? It might make a big difference to your business.
Related:
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Photo by fauxto_digit, used under a Creative Commons license.
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I like the phrase “severe clarity”. That definitely is what you want to accomplish coming out of a business meeting.
One of the more interesting things about meetings in my opinion is that the best meetings are often the shortest. Anything longer then 15 minutes isn’t a meeting anymore, it’s an information session or brainstorming session.
Good thoughts, Stuart. One slight amendment I would offer: in general I agree with you about the 15-minute guideline, but the meeting I had yesterday illustrates an exception to the rule. It went for nearly an hour, and all of it was useful . . . but there were only three of us in the room.
In my experience, if the attendance of a meeting is anything larger than a handful, there will typically be bystanders who are there simply for information or (maybe more often) because they feel that they have to be there. But smaller meetings really can turn into tactical sessions that allow people to share vital information, uncover hidden problems, brainstorm, and then plot out actions to take. It’s more like a huddle on the basketball court than a session in a classroom — and that’s *much* more valuable.
Ah…didn’t think about numbers in the meeting that definitely makes a difference.