Book Description
Are meetings taking over your life? You're not alone. Meet Iris, a sales director so overwhelmed by meetings that she feels like a hamster on a wheel—in fact, she's turned into one. Just in time, she meets a coach—a leading meeting efficiency expert—with a simple system that helps her regain her sanity and humanity.The coach's secret is a laser-like focus on the five biggest meeting pain points:
1. Meeting overload: Professionals waste twenty-four days a year in useless meetings.
2. Missing success ingredients: ninety percent of all professionals attend meetings that lack a clearly stated objective and agenda.
3. Virtual-meeting chaos: Disinterested participants + endless technical glitches huge amounts of wasted time.
4. Agenda adrift: Goals are missed when meetings veer off course.
5. Action distraction: Incomplete action items result in delayed projects and missed deadlines.
The coach demonstrates that these five challenges are damaging Iris's career and costing the world over a trillion dollars each year. He provides practical new solutions that rapidly transform Iris from victim to victor. These solutions are tailored to the technology-driven world in which Iris lives—she discovers how to use e-calendars, PDAs, and virtual meetings to make her life easier, not more complicated. She applies the solutions, gets immediate results, and reclaims her life. The Hamster Revolution for Meetings focuses on a small number of high-impact best practices that really work. Included is a landmark case study that shows how 3,000 Capital One associates reclaimed ten days per year while improving meeting effectiveness by over 35 percent.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- More Praise for The Hamster Revolution for Meetings
- Foreword Ken Blanchard
- 1 STUCK!
- 2 LIFTOFF
- 3 THE BIG FIVE
- 4 WHERE DID MY LIFE GO?
- 5 THE ART OF MEETING LESS
- 6 YOU’RE DRAFTED
- 7 IRIS CHECKS IN
- 8 VIRTUAL MEETING MAGIC
- 9 A SLOW-MOTION TRAIN WRECK
- 10 BECOMING A VIRTUAL MEETING VIRTUOSO
- 11 STAYING THE COURSE
- 12 THE MEETING ACTION PLAN
- 13 PENNY’S VERDICT
- EPILOGUE WE MEET AGAIN
- RESOURCES FAST ANSWERS FOR BUSY HAMSTERS
- RESOURCES CASE STUDY: CAPITAL ONE’S MEETING REVOLUTION
- Notes
- Acknowledgements
- Index
- About the Authors
- SERVICES AVAILABLE
- About Berrett-Koehler Publishers
- Be Connected