Everybody wants your meetings to stop sucking.

A few weeks ago I posted my thoughts on improving meetings. Apparently I'm not the only on who has had to suffer through some bad meetings lately. Every blogger I know is writing on the same topic.

Michael Hyatt is taking some of the complexity out of his organization and has this to say:

The number of meetings. We should be very careful about setting up routine meetings. Once they are in place, they are hard to eliminate—they seem to take on a life of their own. Every once in a while (perhaps annually) it is good to re-evaluate every standing meeting and ask five questions:

“What is the intended outcome of this meeting?”
“Are all the people who attend this meeting really necessary to achieve this outcome?
“Can we meet less frequently and still achieve this outcome?”
“Can we meet for a shorter period of time and still achieve this outcome?”
“Is there some way to accomplish this outcome without a regular meeting?”

Seth Godin has 9 great ideas for shaking up your meetings. Here are a couple:

8. Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.

9. If you're not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.

Bert Decker lists 10 steps to make your meetings better. My favorites:

1. Cut the meetings you have in half. Cut the time of the meetings that remain in half. Unproductive talk and time will fill the space of long meetings - The Peter Principle in action.

4. Be controversial. Not outlandish, but stimulate robust dialogue. The reason most meetings are boring is because most meetings are boring. As the meeting leader, it's up to you to make it interesting.

All of their advice is a little different, but with a consistent theme: don't have one if you don't need to. And if you do, have an agenda, keep it short and lively, and send out minutes promptly.

Together we can make the world a better place. Or at least meetings.

What are meetings like in your organization?

Photo: kjarrett

What to take off your slides. (Part 1)

Why is there so much junk on PowerPoint slides?

Olivia at Speaking about Presenting asks the question, "what would you like to see in PowerPoint slide design in 2009?" This is aimed at an audience already on the better presentation bandwagon. But I still see a lot of basic mistakes in PowerPoint design. So before talking about what I'd like to see in PowerPoint slide design is a discussion of what needs to come off of PowerPoint slides.

There is a direct correlation between the amount of unnecessary junk on the slides and the boredom of the audience. This isn't cause and effect, they both result from the presenter not really understanding the needs of the audience.

So take some time to figure what the audience needs are and get rid of the following elements from your slides.

Company Logo. The audience does not need a reminder of whom you work for on every slide, especially if you all work for the same company.

Animated Logo. One company I worked for had an animated logo in the top left corner of their standard template. Every 30 seconds the logo would spin around and explode in a fountain of color. I can only imagine what went though the mind of the audience, "I think I might buy . . . whoooaaa look at the pretty colors . . . what was I thinking?"

Page numbers. Page numbers are for books and documents. There is absolutely no reason the audience needs to know that a particular slide is number 42 of 168. Unless you plan on giving the audience a printed version of the presentation as a document . But don't do that either. If you must, print it with the page numbers and present it without.

Document control information. I've seen copyright notices, trademarks, file names and revision numbers (e.g. Company.Training.Pres ver. 2.00.1.15) appear in slide footers more than once. Again, this might be appropriate if you print them (please don't), but take them off your presentation. The audience does not need to see these.

Standard Templates. All of the standard Microsoft PowerPoint templates stink. Horribly. The ones that aren't completely awful are so overused that they've become a cliche. Don't use any of them. It is possible to get a well designed, thoughtful and useful template. But be careful, some designers think putting an animated logo on every slide is a good idea.

Bullet Points. Don't get me started on bullet points.

All of these things have one thing in common: they don't serve the needs of the audience. Once you take all of that junk out of your presentation, you can keep a professional, brand oriented appearance using the tips in part 2.

Photo: Phoenixdailyphoto

The most loaded word in the english language.

Accountability. Never has there been a word uttered so often by so many with so little idea of what it really means.

I've worked with many managers to improve their processes. In the early stages of these projects, when we've identified the extent of how bad the problem is, the manager will often turn to me and say, "Isn't this really just a matter of holding people accountable?" or "they need to be more accountable." This is just finger pointing, not accountability. Accountability should always be about yourself not somebody else. Miki Saxon writes about this in the context of the current political environment, but it applies in all organizations.

In QBQ John Miller writes that accountability is the ability to ask the right questions. Examples of wrong questions are:

• Who dropped the ball?
• Who's going to solve this problem?
• When is somebody going to train me?
• Who made them king?

Better questions focus on personal accountability:

• How can I help?
• How can I become a part of the solution?
• What can I do to develop myself?
• What can I do to lead.

Instead of focusing on why something happened or who is at fault, ask questions with these qualities:

• Start with how or what. Why and who are usually counter-productive
• Contain an "I". In the end that is the only person you can actually control
• Focus on action.

These are questions that you can actually answer yourself, and they bring about a mindset and action that will improve things. This is how leaders approach personal accountability.

Photo by a2gemma

What to say when you screw up.

Everybody screws up occasionally. When it happens the apology is important. There is only one right way to say I'm sorry and it should go something like this: "I'm sorry for what I did. I know it caused you pain. I promise it will never happen again." Notice that there is no "but." Anything that begins, "I'm sorry, but..." is not an apology.

Earlier this week one of the web services we use was performing horribly. Nobody from our company complained immediately, some of us even assumed the problem was on our end. Today, however we got the following note form the vendor (the name of the service has been changed.)

The last two days have been rough. HAL9000's performance was terrible. I would like to explain what happened, what we did to fix the problem, and how we are making sure that it doesn't happen again. Your time is valuable, and spending minutes waiting for every HAL9000 operation (or getting kicked out after entering data) is plain not good.

First, the slowdown was a performance issue not a security one. Our database was stuck in a logic loop. The root of the problem was the monthly snapshot that HAL9000 makes of each clients data for use in comparative reporting. The December 1st snapshot was the first one to include the new 2009 regulatory standards. We made a mistake in the computer code, so that the database made a full snapshot with EACH new standard. Needless to say, that's a lot of snapshots. The size of that request (measured in Terabytes, not megabytes or gigabytes) caused a cascade of safety features to kick-in. Our tech team has spent the past two days resetting those safety features and modifying the snapshot code. Short-term problem resolved.

To make sure this does not happen again, we have done two things: first we have upgrade the diagnostic systems that monitor our data base from industry standard to cutting edge, and second we have engaged a consulting company to analyze and optimize our database structure. While this performance issue was the first for HAL9000 in 2.5 years, we agree that even once is too much.

Thank you for your understanding, and we are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. If we can help enter data that has accumulated over the past days, please forward them to your account manager. As always, contact me directly if you would like more gory tech details.

Sincerely,
Jon

That is how you write an apology. It begins with an acknowledgment that they screwed up, it goes on to acknowledge the pain it causes, and it assures us that they have put in procedures to prevent this from happening again. While it does go into some technical detail, it does so only to provide context for the assurances that it won't happen again. The technical stuff doesn't become an excuse. That's important. And they never use the word "but".

So the next time you screw up, remember these three things:

• I'm sorry
• I know it caused you pain
• It won't happen again

Try it at work and at home.

Photo: Half Chinese

Malcolm Gladwell on why we squander talent

Poptech has a video of Malcolm Gladwell discussing some of the ideas in his new book Outliers. (Thanks, Garr !) He discusses how we are very poor at capitalizing on human potential, and what the barriers are to getting all people to achieve their best.





There are barriers to human capitalization common to most business.

Lack of Diversity

There is a lot of research showing that diverse organizations outperform non-diverse ones (thanks, Penelope ). Why is this? Think about it from the negative. The opposite of diversity is promoting and hiring people who are just like ourselves: similar background, experience, and ways of thinking about things. Non-diverse businesses miss out on a wider range of perspective and creativity. It is natural to gravitate to people who our like us, but if we don't keep that tendency in check we squander the potential of many or our employees, and the organization suffers as a result.

Arrogance

The best ideas often come from the people doing the work. It makes sense that folks who actually interact with the customer or assemble the product might have some good ideas about improving the customer experience or the manufacturing process. But organizations with rigid hierarchies only listen to the engineers and MBAs, completely squandering the intelligence and creativity of the folks closest to the customer. The best business listen to emplyees at all levels of the org chart.


What are some of the barriers to human capitalization in your organization?

Improve Your Dessert

This blog is mostly about process improvement, but it is generally about everything improvement, and today it is about dessert improvement. Here it goes: throw out your Cool Whip right now! Wired magazine has a very informative article on what is actually in Cool Whip and guess what, cream is nowhere to be found. In fact the ingredients are pretty disgusting. Go ahead, Read it.

Now I understand using concoctions like this for the sake of convenience, but the truth is that making real whipped cream is so cheap and easy there is almost no reason not to. Here's how you do it :

• Buy heavy whipping cream
• put in mixing bowl with some sugar (and maybe a dash of vanilla)
  
• whip with electric blender
• Its done when it looks and feels like whipped cream.
  

if you are too lazy to do that, use Reddi Whip instead of Cool Whip. At least the first ingredient on the Reddi Whip can is actually cream.

Photo by 91RS