The Rules of Management, 4th Edition

RULE 6

Make meetings fun

I guess that when you were working your way up to your illustrious position of today you had to sit through many interminable meetings, all boring, all stupifyingly dull. Well, the pattern has to be broken somewhere and I’m relying on you to break it. The old way of doing meetings has to stop and you’re the very person to do the stopping.

So let’s make ’em fun. Now, before we go on, I remember a tip I read somewhere. Basically you were supposed to give out five coins to each meeting member and when they wanted to speak they had to spend a penny. Once they had used up their coins they were done and dusted and couldn’t say anything more. It was supposed to make people really cautious about speaking and reluctant to spend ...