Stuff to Read

You might find some of this interesting: Here is the reading list published by the Army Chief of Staff. Note earlier years contain some different material, worth browsing. I’ve always liked org’s that had reading lists (though have to be wary of flavor of the year books). I marked a few from the list to […]

SSC Editorial: Bad Meetings or Meeting Badly

Bad Meetings or Meeting Badly is the editorial of the day today. Looking at it today, I wish I had done a better job on the title, because my intent (and execution) is to get attendees to see the other side of the coin on meeting requests. Take a look if you have a couple […]

Logistics For All Day Meetings

Quick thoughts about the work required to make all day meetings run smoothly: Suitable space with enough seating (and reasonable chairs!) Turn down the AC if the room is going to be crowded to help with the heat load Plenty of power strips – few people will make it through the day on laptop battery […]

A New Stressor

I tend to be amused when I run into something that causes me stress because I like to think – foolishly – that I’ve learned to manage stress and even avoid it by dealing with the underlying source of the stress. Last week I was in a meeting for 3-1/2 days. More workshop than meeting. […]

Meetings In Glass Houses

If you’ve followed my writing for a while you’ll know I’m a fan of translucency (transparency) in most things business. Right now I’m working next to a meeting room that has glass walls – talk about transparency! It seems like a good idea, it lets in a lot of light and makes it feel more […]

Interesting Reading for September 18, 2012

More stuff you may find interesting. Prepare for your first security breach. Sobering. As data professionals we’re going to get pulled into these incidents at some point when they happen. Read now and hope it’s never on your watch or even during your tenure. Conways Law says that organizations design systems that match the communication […]

Logical Fallacy Poster

Ran across this recently, YourLogicalFallacyIs.com is a site that lists all the ways you can apply logic badly, and they’ve put it into a pretty nice poster. Seems like this should be up in every meeting room!

The Armor of Transparency

Yesterday I blogged about hosting a daily status meetings and some of the tricks I use to make it work. One of those that is worth extra attention is the meeting notes – at the end of each meeting I send out notes (not minutes – not that formal) that include: Who attended Key metrics […]

The Daily Status Meeting

For the past six months or so I’ve hosted a daily status meeting for a large project. It started out scheduled for 15 minutes and as the team grew, I found that we often ran out of time – not due to idle chit chat, but because we spent 3 or 4 or 5 minutes […]

The Mute the Phone Office Prank

The client I work with as a lot of conference rooms, all with the standard Polycom conference phone that works well enough. Most just have the phone, a few have the extension microphones (image below). I was a couple minutes early for a recent meeting where I was an attendee but not the host, and […]