Ten Ways to Run a Successful Meeting

Tired of spending your valuable hours at meetings that have no apparent purpose? Join the club. Most professionals attend more than 60 meetings a month, research shows, and more than one-half of that time is wasted. Assuming those meetings run about an hour, that's more than 30 hours of unproductive time each month—the majority of an entire work week. The book No More Pointless Meetings: Breakthrough Sessions That Will Revolutionize the Way You Work, presents a how-to guide to get the most out of these group sessions. Author Martin Murphy places much of his focus on both idea-generating and problem-solving meetings. But many of the following 10 tips from the book apply universally. Murphy is founder and president of QuantumMeetings, a management education consultancy specializing in innovative collaboration practices, with clients such as IBM, Coca-Cola, Pillsbury, Lever Brothers and the city of Atlanta.