15 Reasons Meetings Fail

Meetings – rendezvous, dates, trysts – are important to keep the cycle of corporate and personal lives moving.

1. The unknown voice: you receive a call from an unknown number and a faintly recognizable voice seeking a meeting. No names offered, no names asked.
2. The unknown schedule: you invite people over for a meeting that everyone believes is important, then you realize it clashes with another one scheduled by your boss, and you hurry to cancel it.
3. The urgent matter elsewhere: the people you invited wait for you while you have an urgent matter to attend to elsewhere.
4. Block Your Date: wrong date, wrong time, wrong place, wrong agenda … no meeting.
5. No room for social media: there is only so much room in a meeting for people in the physical world; the moment you log in to FB, they log off.
6. Raver versus raconteur: you don’t get nowhere by yelling, ranting or raving when you are dealing with perfectly sane, knowledgeable professionals.
7. The stretch: a two-minute catch-up turns into a 50-minute farce.
8. Netmeeting: you log in and then pick up the newspaper.
9. Under-prepared: you are invited for a quick update but in reality you are expected to present how, when, where, who, what, why and why not.
10. Bark up the wrong tree: you are invited to a meeting to discuss something critical only to realize that it was about the latest health fad.
11. Latecomers, unwelcome: nobody likes latecomers, and like in Cricket, you are banished for a length of time thrice the number of minutes you were late (nominal late fee system has not been found to work!).
12. First impression: you made a very poor first impression by plucking the piece of broccoli out the gap in your front teeth.
13. Interject: you are explaining the workings of a complex formula that you cracked only to find someone else finishing off your sentences.
14. No humor: you cracked a joke that nobody liked.
15. No respite: you travel two hours to meet someone you like to listen to and she does not tell you that she has a sore throat.