Wow,

It has been a long while ….very long but I missed this and thought the world really couldn’t go on without my sales observations about overmanagement, my stories reflecting on great experiences – and not so great ones – along with rants about daily frustrations that I could link to business.

And I thought, I would go with one of the latter for the 2nd season of my blog.  I will pull one on stats in 2 posts from this one, as I will have hit the magic 50 posts mark.  I suppose I get a gold watch with this.  But we will see then.

Today, I attended a meeting.  It is Sunday, and one of the associations in which one of my girls is an active member was having a “year end celebration”.   I thought it was more of a “Everything you should do if you want people to know you have zero experience in planning, management or family life”.

So the meeting was to start at 4pm on a Sunday, they had invited members and their families, were to provide a light snack and rides at an amusement park for a fee.  If this had been a movie, people would have walked out in the first 10 minutes, but since there was over 100 people in the room, they thought they would start the meeting 30 minutes late.  Since it was a Sunday, they also thought it would be a great time to be with your family to stare at a blank wall while we waited for someone so important that everyone had to wait for the presentation to begin.

Nobody took the time to apologize to guests for starting late, so they just went on.   After an amateur slide show that lasted forever, they treated everyone to chips and doughnuts BEFORE going for the rides.

I have to skim on all the details of this comedy of horrors(not errors)….but there is really a point.  Please understand that this is obviously run by volunteers with zero experience in the business world.   However, the point I will make is that often, way too often, to a lesser extent, this happens to business people too when they set up meetings.

If you want to lose an audience, that’s the way to do it.  Set expectations, very lightly, and then completely ignore them.  Don’t talk to people as they wait and realize that it won’t be on time.  And please, if you have a 90 minutes agenda, and start 30 minutes late, DO NOT ADJUST THE AGENDA!!!! Assume that everyone will settle in and the 30 minutes of silence rested everyone.  We will talk about expectations in the next few posts, some good examples and how it has worked magic for me and my clients.  In the meantime, in honor of my Sunday spent learning about a new low for meeting management, I thought I would pass this one along…..