Are your meetings a waste of time? Of course they are – but what’s the solution?”

Expert gives what seems an insane answer. Then a quick video reveals a billionaire’s views

Sadly our business only has one meeting a year. It is called Christmas Lunch.

This is clearly not enough. Most businesses have lots of meetings.

So I am going to double the frequency and introduce The Summer Piss-up.

I also plan lots of presentations and seminars and conferences and boot camps and summits.

But am I getting carried away? Research reveals that:

  • 10% of workers have suffered through something so tedious they invented an excuse to leave.
  • One in eight admits to having fallen asleep during a presentation.
  • 50% say they saw a colleague doing so.
  • A third say they started day-dreaming.
  • 80% said they would get more done at their desks.

What is the answer?

Well, Christian Schwaiger, VP at Sharp Business Solutions Europe, says the key is “making sure everyone gets involved”.

Unless I am missing the plot here, this means your entire staff will be bored s***less almost all day, every day.

There is an alternative, though.

In 2008 I interviewed Peter Hargreaves of Hargreaves Lansdown to discover his business secrets.

Today he is worth a couple of billion pounds, but in those days he was still rubbing along on a few million.

Watch what he had to say.


By the way, if you’re stuck with meetings whether you like it or not, I will tell you how to make the most of them in a while.

P.S. To all those idiots who pay to have phoney automated comments up here in the fond hope of getting their rubbish products mentioned: don’t waste your money. I delete them.

 

 

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

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