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Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Great post (and COMMENTS) on the Tom Peters blog about how to make meetings efficient.

I deal with a lot of online meetings and the most effective ones are structured - not completely structured but still structured.

The most important rule that comes out of a good meeting techniques is to have an objective. If you don't have an objective for the meeting, then don't have it. A status report is NOT an objective - sharing critical issues with others is. But if no one has anything to share, then it's simply not worth meeting.

That said, there is a certain value of the "face-to-face" which no one can deny (and Ted knows I've tried - no way to get back to the original post). They really need to get video conferencing working better - has anyone tried the new video conferencing in MSN Messenger?. Maybe that will make it easier for "virtual" users to work together.

Skype goes a long way but it can still go further.

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