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<\/a>Stockton's story has been on my mind because I'm releasing a new book today called No Fail Meetings<\/em><\/a>. Meetings are important but the way they're being conducted in many organizations today is incredibly wasteful.<\/p>\nHow wasteful? Some estimates peg the loss to American businesses of bad meetings as high as $37 billion annually. Many large companies lose as much as $75 million a year to bad meetings. I don't care how big the company is – $75 million is a huge hit to the bottom line. In my book, I lay out a detailed plan for holding fewer, more effective meetings, and would encourage all leaders who are looking to get a handle on meetings to give it a read<\/a>.<\/p>\n For this column, I want to focus on the shortening those important meetings that have to be held. It may be a challenge to both cut the number of meetings and their length at the same time. With fewer meetings, you might feel pressure to make the remaining meetings longer to make up for it, but that is a huge mistake.<\/p>\n Time on the clock is money. In meetings, that compounds. If you have a meeting of a half dozen or more people, one hour-long meeting can cost your organization hundreds of dollars. If it's a meeting of the executive staff, thousands. If you halve not only the number but also the length of meetings, you'll save a lot of company time and money for better uses.<\/p>\n Here are five tested ideas for how to get out of those meetings faster:<\/p>\n Parkinson's Law states that work expands to the time allotted to it. That is absolutely true of meetings. One reason we spend so much time in them is that we schedule them too long. Consequently, conversations that should have taken ten minutes instead frequently stretch to fill a whole hour\u2014and people's eyes glaze over about halfway through.<\/p>\n\t\tFewer AND shorter<\/h3>\n
1. Schedule shorter meetings<\/h2>\n