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Rate the last business meeting you attended on a scale of good, bad or ugly. If you picked the first option, you're either lucky or happened to be in the hands of a masterful facilitator. Or you're simply delusional.
Here's an example of the ugly, a particularly hideous meeting because it was inflicted every week, like a recurring nightmare. The meeting was sacrosanct; you had to have a very good excuse to be absent.
It was scheduled for every Friday at 10 a.m., to run no more than an hour, with up to 15 people gathered to organize the week ahead.
Except it was as rare as snow in August that the meeting went off on time and rarer still that the weary victims had to sit in a windowless room for a mere hour. The boss, who ran the meeting, would postpone it until 11, 11:30, sometimes noon and then work a laptop at the table, gossiping about children, politics, what was on TV the night before. Sometimes the boss did e-mail with running commentary. Two hours. Two-and-a-half hours. Everyone starving, sullen, hostile.
So much for sacrosanct. It goes without saying that...