Navigating the Fustercluck

Meetings: The 10th Circle of Hell

Dante famously wrote about the 9 circles of Hell. The 10th is one giant conference room where no one is sure why they're there. But damned if you do, damn if you don't, they talk endlessly anyway.

Welcome to the second edition of NTF. The weekly #jargonmonoxide-free business newsletter. This week we're focusing on the meetings:

You Spend the First Fifteen Years of Your Career Trying to Get into Meetings and the Rest Trying to Get Out of Them. ?– Tom Goodwin

Prioritize. If you don’t figure out how to prioritize your day, people will find a way to pull you every which way, until stretched beyond the point where you can focus and be productive. Meetings are rarely the most productive way to spend your time, so eliminate those that waste time by limiting those you attend to only the ones that are deserving of your time and effort.

Taming the Meeting Monster with a Two Pizza Maximum

Love him or hate him, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people in the world. Part of his success may be attributed to his decision to stop complaining about excessive meetings and actually do something about them.

?For one thing, at Amazon, there are to be no meetings that require more people than can be fed with two pizzas. Beyond that, you don’t have a meeting, you have a convention. Bezos believes that all the wasted productivity in the room leads to nothing more than a major fustercluck.

?Seriously, the next time you’re scheduling a meeting, ask yourself if you even need enough people to justify ordering one pizza. And if I’m going to be there, please order pepperoni, a little extra crispy with honey on the side, thanks.

Jargonmonoxide Alert!!!

I was asked to moderate a brainstorming session for P&G. Seven different agencies were involved and I was chosen to be the chief cat herder.

?One challenge in conducting such sessions at a company so large is that they tend to have their own language, full of jargon that newer participants may not be familiar with. To nip that in the bud, I opened the meeting like this…

?As most of you know me, you know that I’m a pretty laid back guy. But today, I have one very hard and fast rule- No TLA’s!

In unison, the room repeated this- No TLA’s!

But I wasn’t going to stop there: No, really, I’m serious about this: No TLA’s!

The room responded with about half the enthusiasm as the first time:

No TLA’s!

And to prove how serious I am about this NO TLA Policy, I’ve brought a TLA jar.

It will cost you $1 dollar every time you use a TLA. So, is everybody clear? No TLA’s?

The response was cut in half again. People not quite as sure of themselves or the question this time. There was an awkward pause until someone put up her hand. As I had expected, it was the most junior person in the room:

Wegs, I’m sorry. Would you please tell me what a TLA is?

?Ahhhhh!, I said. I was hoping someone would finally ask, because I just made that term up. So let me explain: a TLA is simply a Three Letter Acronym!

The entire room broke down laughing. They knew that they had been had.

That I was poking fun at all the abbreviations and “jargonmonoxide” that made these meetings so confusing. For this meeting, we were going to talk peoplespeak.

And you know what? It was one of the best meetings we’d had in quite some time. We were all speaking the same language! And when someone slipped up, the room self-policed itself and collected a dollar for the TLA jar. Everyone had a good laugh while learning more from one another.

As I concluded at the end of the session, Thanks for helping to defeat the dreaded TLA’s today. Because the only thing worse than a three-letter acronym is a four-letter acronym. And we need to eliminate those ASAP!

###

Want more?!?! Navigating the Fustercluck, the podcast can be found on Spotify and other major platforms.

Daily linkedIn posts can be found on the page of Jim "Wegs" Wegerbauer, LinkedIn.com/in/wegs.

?