Summary: Bad meetings are the worst. They’re a waste of time, and they feel like a distraction from real work. Mamie Kanfer Stewart and Tai Tsao, co-authors of the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Momentum-Creating-Effective-Engaging-Enjoyable/dp/1619617250" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Momentum</a>, are on a mission to make meetings more effective, meaningful and enjoyable.<br> Since 2013, they’ve offered coaching, training and even developed mobile apps to help teams support more effective meetings. In this episode, you’re going to get their blueprint for successful meetings, including actionable tips that you can immediately implement with your team.<br> <br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Momentum-Creating-Effective-Engaging-Enjoyable-ebook/dp/B0773WXFC7/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>Get Mamie and Tai’s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Momentum-Creating-Effective-Engaging-Enjoyable-ebook/dp/B0773WXFC7/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Momentum</a> on Amazon.<br> Find out more on their site, <a href="http://meeteor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Meeteor.com</a>.<br> <br> <br> About Meetor and Momentum<br> Mamie Kanfer Stewart: About four years ago, I started the company Meeteor, and we actually started not with meetings as our focus but with a strategy tool for project management. If you’re giving yourself a blank stare right now, that’s what I was getting from everybody who I talked to when I said, “I’m building a product and trying to help teams with more effective strategy for their project management.”<br> In the process of trying to figure out how to sell this tool, I was speaking to some consultants, and one of them said to me, “This is really interesting, and I see how it’s valuable but this little meetings thing that you’re doing, that’s really what people need help with. I couldn’t sell your strategy to all my clients, but I could totally sell them a meetings tool. Their meetings are terrible.”<br> I had never realized how bad meetings were until I started talking to people about meetings. When I would go to networking events or just kind of in my daily life talking to people about what I was doing, I’d say, “I’m working on tools and trainings to help people have more effective meetings.”<br> <br> Instantly, everybody had a story to tell me of a bad meeting they attended at least that week, if not that day.<br> <br> It was so clear that this was a problem that needed help with, that people needed a solution for and I felt like, “I know exactly what I’ve got to do here.”<br> We shifted Meteor to focus 100% on helping people have productive meetings. From that came our blog and eventually our book.<br> <br> Why are there so many bad meetings?<br> Mamie Kanfer Stewart: For leaders, if you work in bigger companies or small companies, most of your time is spent in back to back meetings. We heard that from a lot of our customers.<br> People run meetings that are not productive, they’re wasteful. You just invite everyone to the meeting instead of making sure that people who come to the meetings are really the people you want to be there or who are critical to the success of the meeting.<br> You gather people in the room, but you really don’t know what you want to achieve at the end. Without a purpose, without a clear objective for your meetings, you waste everyone’s time. People feel like meetings are taking them away from real work, so if I spent one hour in meetings, I took away one hour that I could’ve actually focused on my own work.<br> That’s one of the biggest pain points we heard from our clients.<br> <br> We don’t think it’s just the meeting leader’s problem—it’s part of your company culture. <br> <br> Tai Tsao: If your company culture is encouraging people to participate in meetings,
