Meetings and Goals

Warren Buffet on CNBC tonight tells Liz Clayman that he doesn't have meetings with the managers of the businesses he owns, he just tells them what he expects. The woman who runs Borsheim's jewelry, which Warren Buffet owns, says at the start of each year, he sends her a single sheet of paper with the business goals for the year.

From my own experience, the amount of meetings tends to run inversely to the focus on goals. Meetings are often where poor managers assert their control, or stoke their egos. Very few things get resolved at planned meetings, fewer still when they are lengthy.

The less formal a meeting, the more effective it is. Short, frequent chats with team members can replace a lengthy weekly meeting with much better effect.

Meetings are good for brainstorming, mediocre for motivating, and poor for communicating in a level, focused, ego-free manner.

If you have to have a meeting, it needs to have a goal. Send out an agenda, keep it short and focused, and end it with a summary of the action items agreed upon to meet the goal. Follow up, too.