How to waste a ton of time

Anybody who has every sat through a business meeting knows it can be a total waste of time.  Here is a way to make the most of every meeting.

When I was a consultant for Arthur Andersen in Seattle, Washington we ended every meeting with an exercise called “B’s and C’s.”  In this exercise, we asked every participant in the meeting to identify and list as many benefits or concerns as a result of the things discussed during the meeting.

The results would look something like this:

Benefits

• First to market 
• Solid solution that is developed and ready to be sold 
• Favorable terms and conditions with our vendors 

Concerns

• How will we reduce delivery time to less than 5 days?
• Will customer support be ready to address our customers needs?
• How will we be able track and calculate the ROI?

What usually happens is we generate a list of "pats on the back" that we called benefits and a list of "hot buttons" that we called concerns.   

With this list the meeting facilitator should jump right to the concerns.  The facilitator would then work through each concern with the participants until a solution was found or an assignment given to solve the concern.

Walking out of every meeting was a list of assignments made and plan to address the concerns resulting from the meeting.

-Trevin Rasmussen