Meeting Ticker

A friend and colleague, Stacey, suggested I check out this Meeting Ticker website. In her words it is an awareness tool, perhaps designed to scare (or shame) us into running effective meetings.
Being in the sexual health field, I don't know that I believe in the scare tactics or shame and blame game, but I really like the idea of this website forcing us to think about how we are spending our staff time in meetings. For example, sitting around talking about your organization's money troubles without dedicated focus to addressing those challenges is wasteful.

http://tobytripp.github.com/meeting-ticker/

Who's in charge here???

Oftentimes a meeting goes south because no one is in charge. Now I know I'm talking about one dominant culture's idea about what a meeting is and how it should go, but yeah, that's what I'm talking about. When someone is supposed to be in charge, but doesn't know how to be, or doesn't want to take charge, or worst of all, they think they are in charge, but they're not, a meeting can cause real, physical, psychological PAIN. So if you want to have a successful meeting, identify a person to be in charge. Make sure this person wants to be or is at least willing to be in that role and either has some natural ability or is willing to learn meeting management skills.