Is it a meeting, or a presentation?
Most of the ‘meetings’ I’ve been to are actually presentations.
You’ve got to ask yourself, is this a group session where everyone has an opportunity to discuss/propose a solution a single or multiple challenges, or is it just some bag of hotair waffling for too long whilst everyone day dreams about something they’d rather be doing? Because in my book, that’s a presentation.
Also, ask yourself, is this ‘meeting’ valuable? Is it an internal ‘meeting’ has some company or organisation instructed everyone to attend? I’ve been to ‘meetings’ with over 100 ‘participants’ which is just a presentation – 100 people all working for the same company – average salary of £30k say – it’s an all day meeting. So labour costs are £30k x 100 = £3m, divided by 12 (months) divided by 20 (working days) for the sake of simplicity – £12,500 in salaries, plus travel expenses, venue cost etc – it’s £15k easy – usually given most people attention span and willingness / ability to retain information I’d bet you could condense that 8 hours of blah blah blah into a single side of A4 – which, as if by magic they’ll hand you on the way out, or send in a e-mail (which will usually be padded out to 8 pages of Powerpoint with lots of pointless graphics and BIG lettering).
In 2 weeks times the only information from it people will remember were any cheesy jokes they said at the start, they’re refer to the notes if they want anything useful. Could have saved £15k and just sent the notes out by e-mail.
It’s that sort of mental exorcizes that keep me almost sane in this sorts of things.
