Sharlyn Lauby - Essential Meetings Blueprints for Managers

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh (YG) is a marketing enthusiast with years of experience who believes in aligning marketing operations to the organization strategy. He heads the global marketing operations at Corporater Inc. and is responsible for marketing strategy development and execution across 10 countries.

YG is known for his influential marketing articles on LinkedIn, ManagementNext.com, EPMChannel, and many more. He has an uncanny knack for inbound marketing, strategy execution, event management, market research analysis, and brand management. He is also proficient at strategy frameworks and metrics and strategic business planning, and is known for his ability to point out the source of problems.

He is a published fiction/nonfiction author and his books have received great reviews from UK Daily and Morning Star and appreciation from Adam Grant, the Wharton Professor and New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take . YG is currently working on a strategic marketing title.

Almitra Karnik is currently a senior product and solutions marketing manager at Twilio Inc., where she leads the marketing efforts around the entire Twilio technology platform. She develops targeted benefit-selling strategies for customers, including messaging, positioning, competitive analysis, and measurable Go-To-Market campaigns along with thought leadership and AR/PR engagements. She was formerly a product and solutions marketing manager at Cisco Systems, as well as product marketing manager at EMC Corporation. She began her career as a software developer at EMC Corporation.

Almitra has a master's degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA in marketing management from Santa Clara University.

I would like to thank my husband, Amit Sharma, for being my inspiration and guide not only during the course of this book, but throughout my professional career.

"Kill stupid meetings."

That was the response to the question "Which company rule would you get rid of?"

According to the management-consulting firm Bain & Company, employees spend between 21 and 28 hours a week in meetings and this number continues to rise in double-digit percentages. No wonder we hate meetings! They consume a major amount of our time. Nothing is more dreaded in our professional lives than the business meeting.

My guess is we've all been in a worthless meeting, so I don't need to waste time telling you about the impact of bad meetings. We're here to talk about conducting valuable meetings. But for a second, think about the impact of a poorly run meeting on the organization. Here's an example:

A department holds a weekly meeting. For the purposes of simple math, let's say 10 people attend the meeting and they each make $50,000/annually ($24/hour). Their department meeting costs $240 each week or $12,000 a year. If the meeting is run well and produces good outcomes, the $12,000 could be money well spent. If not, think about what the company is wasting.