Corporate Cultures: Focus on Meetings

Hey Everyone, thanks for visiting my world of thinking about the real world differences of stage 3 vs. stage 4 corporate cultures. If you are not familiar with the concept of corporate cultures, there is an article about it here.  In this article, is a concept I call, "Corporate Entrepreneurship."  It's a personal daily practice.  You may ask... what is this practice?  The idea is to think like an entrepreneur all the time, even if I (or anyone reading this,) has a job and is employed by a corporation.  Opportunity exists everywhere, it's all around us.  We just need to view the situation from that perspective and everything can change.  In my case, Tribal Leadership provides the filter to look for areas of opportunities, formulate a plan with real business outcomes, then build the pitch, then execute.  The following is one of these ideas, (I have many more.)

Meetings

Some meetings go great, others fail miserably.  When I say fail... I mean there is no definite outcome.  No exchange of valuable information has occurred.

This got me thinking about how a triad, (three people) could make a huge impact in one small area of a business.

For the sake of illustration, let's consider one typical weekly meeting.  We can call this the weekly sales call.  In this weekly gathering, we have twenty people.  Consider the company spends $50 per person in total compensation to attend the meeting.  That's 20 x $50 = $1,000 per hour.  So, the weekly sales call costs the company 1k per week x 52 weeks a year, that's a grand total of 52k per year.  Please keep in mind... this is for one meeting.  There could be a total of 5 or more such weekly meetings.

Effectiveness

What got me thinking about this is the fact many meetings have no measurable outcome.  Usually, the meeting is guided by someone that is not focused on internal business culture.  They may be in product management, sales, operations, marketing, or an executive.  The point is... I have noticed an opportunity to zero in on the size, cost, and effectiveness of one area in a business.  Just ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the success or fail rate of our meetings?
• How could we improve this process?
• Where could we save money by focusing on meetings?
• How can this turn into a repeatable process for the overall market place?

Opportunity

Now... you may be saying to yourself, "Of course this is a problem, every company has these issues, it's basic communication and human nature." Yes, but here is the opportunity.. apply the concept of a triad to the meeting.  This would require a cultural shift in the business.  Employees would need to be aligned on a set of shared values, they would need to be empowered with a new set of tools to pull this off.  This is what Tribal Leadership is all about. It provides the tools and techniques to align people to be more effective.  

The Goal

The overall goal would be to make meetings shorter, more effective, and with less people.  Let's shoot for three people, meeting once a week, for only 30 minutes.  Let's do the math.  That's 3 people x $50 per hour = $150.  Remember... our goal is to cut the meeting time in half... so the cost could be $75 for the entire thing.  Annualized, that could be $75 x 52 weeks = $3,900 per year.

Conclusion

Taking a look at this real world business situation points me in the area of huge opportunity.  Given the example above... a company could be spending 52k on one meeting over a year's time. The goal could be to bring that number down to $3,900, (even half, 26k might be attractive.) That would be a savings of $48,100 on one meeting.

If we scale this within the organization to 5 weekly meetings, (i.e. Product Management, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and General Staff,) that would be a total of 5 weekly meetings.  5 meetings x 52k = $260k in meeting expenses.  (I've left out meeting room availability, phone charges, and other additional costs.)  Using the concept of triads and an effective business mindset, the potential is to bring 260k down to $19,500, for a total savings of $240,500.

Is this even possible?  I truly believe it is.  But, if you're sitting in stage 3 it may appear as impossible. The goal is to bring the group to stage 4, then make the necessary changes in the area of meetings.  Alas, in a real working environment, even saving a company 20% to 50% of 260k may make any business owner happy.

One final thought. The real challenge is in the first step. How does a company change behavior and build belief into an area of real opportunity? It's in the values people... start there... always.

If there are any questions or comments, please let me know.

Thanks for your time and interest!

Jer