How to save the world from bad meetings: A hyperbole

Today for our asynchronous lecture, we (I say we loosely, I'm not sure how many people actually do the assignments) watched a couple ted talks that were available in Chapter 8 of Organisational Communication by Zink and Zink. The ted talk I will be discussing in this particular blog is called: How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings. 

The Ted Talker spoke about how many meetings function very unsuccessfully, and end up being a waste of peoples time. A bad meeting could take place for a number of reasons: the moderator doesn't know how to run the meeting, the meeting is formatted poorly with no concise direction or imperative, the participants don't know why they are at the meeting, etc. 

Bad, boring meetings have a reputation for being very prevalent in the business world. When I think of business, I think of meetings. I think of a stock image of a man in a suit rubbing his temples while he stares at the clock. Fellow business people sit around him. In his mind I can guess what he is thinking: When is this over? Why am I here? Bored to tears boring-when-is-hometime- type boredom. 

Anyways, the Ted Talker went on and talked about how participants can make a change in how meetings are run. Firstly, they can stop mindlessly accepting invitations to meetings that they don't really know anything about. Instead, they can further inquire about the nature of the meeting, and evaluate if their attendance is really very necessary. This way, the person running the meeting can kind of get their act together in describing what the meeting entails, and you can stop wasting your time.