The 6 Secrets to High Performance Meetings

PART 1: What We Do to Make Ours the Best. Meetings. Ever.
Oh …the dreaded business meeting—a breeding ground for yawning executives, note-jotting interns and lukewarm coffee.  When did company meetings become so lackluster?  Why have meetings turned from team pow-wows to snooze fests?  And most importantly, will we ever get out of the rut of dealing with the mind-numbing, monotonous Powerpoint? 

Imagine a business meeting that, for once, does exactly what it’s supposed to do:  everyone’s productivity is boosted, there are more exchanges of ideas, the coffee is piping hot.  Sound too good to be true?

Well, it’s possible.  We have 6 secrets that will make your meeting one that you can actually classify as “high performance.”  It’s time to amp up those weekly meetings, entrepreneurs.



The bizperc conference room has SMART Board technology, web
conferencing capabilities and the perfect setting for a business meeting.



1.      Ever heard of an agenda?

We know you like to fly by the seat of your pants—it’s exciting and it’s quite often “how you do business.”  And although this “take whatever comes at me” mentality may work for you in the startup world, it may not work so well during a high performance meeting.  You need to prepare an agenda before the meeting begins and to stay on track throughout the meeting. 

What we do at TBP…At Think Big Partners, everybody comes prepared to present their own 5-minute portion of the meeting.  This clears the air for any questions that people have about roles and responsibilities and it makes for an effective use of meeting time.

2.      The importance of a table

Believe it or not, a meeting can go from a low quality snooze-fest to a high performance pow-wow with one simple addition: a table.  When business meetings are conducted inside a professional-looking conference room (as opposed to the kitchen, the boss’s office, or around the water cooler), attendees will understand that you mean business and that it’s time to get down to it.

What we do at TBP…During our Think Big Partners meetings, we meet in our rentable, high-tech conference room located on our 4^th floor of bizperc.  Not only does it provide a stimulating environment for the development of ideas, but it provides all of the necessary technologies to produce a great meeting.

3.      Communication is key

High performance meetings happen when emails, Post-It notes, and phone calls simply don’t do the trick.  They allow a time and a place for everybody to come together and share thoughts, ideas, tasks and questions.  High performance meetings can incorporate other means of communication other than just face-to-face.  For example, video chat (by using Skype or the like), web conferencing, customized intranet, and mics can be used.

What we do at TBP…Think Big Partners has implemented a once-a-week company meeting every Monday afternoon.  The open-format meeting takes place in our high-tech conference room in case we need to use our web conferencing capabilities or other technologies.

4.      Get techno

In a world that thrives on technology, we believe that your meetings should, too.  After all, if it’s going to be high performance, it might as well be high tech too.  Utilize SMART Boards, Powerpoints (as long as they kick butt) and Wikis to enhance your business meetings and amp up participation.

What we do at TBP…We are raving fans of our SMART Board technology and use it at almost every meeting.  SMART Boards allow for a meeting leader to write ideas, thoughts and plans on a white board, and then print it out for the group at the end of the meeting.  It saves a lot of time and a lot of hand cramping. 

5.      Accountability

During a meeting, actions need to be delegated.  Do not adjourn the meeting without setting important accountability standards.  Assign different responsibilities to each person with estimated completion dates.  Good ideas will only materialize into results when they are a part of an action plan.

What we do at TBP…Other than jotting down notes during each meeting, the TBP team also utilizes Zoho, an online software that delegates who does what job, its due date, and the status of each important task.  It helps keep everybody on the same page.

6.      Keep an eye (or two) on the clock

Entrepreneurs are busy people.  High performance meetings do not need to take hours and hours out of the workday.  Budget your time during meetings.

What we do at TBP…One of our co-founders is a stickler for this secret!  He takes his watch off during the meeting and places it in front of him so he can keep an eye on the clock at all times.  Additionally, we only delegate a certain amount of time for each item.  This way, we are much more productive and the decision-making process becomes a lot easier.

See?  I told you so.  It’s not that difficult to put together a high performance meeting sans the snoring employees in the back.  By implementing the right tools, attitude, and environment, your meeting can turn from a snooze-fest to a productive pow-wow in no time.  Take it from us, we do it all the time!

Stay tuned tomorrow.  I'm going to clue you in on another aspect of meetings that may leave your audience snoring even more: presentations.  For advice on how to avoid snores, yawns and blank stares, tune into tomorrow's post!

Written by Allison Way.  Allison is a writer and videographer for Think Big Partners, Kansas City's mentorship-based business incubator and startup accelerator.  To read more of Allison's work, check out the Kansas City Entrepreneurship Examiner as well as her articles on Helium, BrooWaha, eZine and Newsvine.

The Chilean Miner Rescue, Post-it Notes & Apollo 13 - Innovation and Failure Was Not An Option

Today, Wednesday, October 13th, 2010, marked a great day in humanity, innovation and was witness to the awesome power of the "failure is not an option" mindset.

Chile's 33 trapped miners were shuttled up a narrow escape shaft to freedom and joyous reunions in a meticulously planned rescue operation that ended the longest underground entrapment in human history and showed the true power of forced innovation.

One after another, the miners climbed into a missile-like steel capsule barely wider than a man's shoulders and took a 15-minute journey through 2,000 feet of rock to the surface. Dubbed the Phoenix I capsule, it was the result of a joint collaborative effort between the Chilean Navy and NASA that created a 924 pound rescue capsule with an interior height of 6 feet 4 inches and a 23 inch interior diameter.

The red, white and blue (painted in the colors of Chile's flag) empty capsule was lowered by a winch over 2000 feet into the earth. With each successive run the operators learned how to operate this new innovation marvel and the capsule-rescue operation got faster as it went along. All the men were safely above ground in 22 hours, 37 minutes, after it started.



This example of human achievement with real people's lives at stake, very much reminds me of the fateful Apollo 13 mission that intended to land on the moon in April, 1970. When the oxygen tank ruptured, severely damaging the Service Module's spacecraft's electrical system, the focal point of the mission quickly went from a successful lunar landing to simply the safe return of astronauts James Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise.

This forced the crew to shut down the Command Module to conserve its batteries and oxygen needed for the last hours of flight, and use the Lunar Module's resources as a "lifeboat" during the return trip to Earth. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17, 1970 and the mission was termed a "successful failure".



Apollo 13 (15th Anniversary Edition) [Blu-ray]

Harnessing the power of forced innovation can produce incredible and useful results, such as the Chilean miner rescue capsule.. Innovation in history has produced a wide range of results, ranging from the truly absurd and silly, to deadly serious and critical to human life.

Even inventions that were not successful sometimes have produced the most remarkable outcomes. The same year as the Apollo 13 "successful failure", another failure was in the works.

Spencer Silver, a 3M chemist trying to formulate a stronger adhesive than the one that 3M currently had on the market, created an adhesive that ended up being super weak instead of super strong. This produced an adhesive that, in the lexicon of science, consisted of “inherently tacky elastomeric copolymer microspheres.” On the molecular level, this substance resembled the pebbled skin of a basketball. This characteristic sabotaged its bonding power; the tiny spaces between the microspheres made it impossible to get complete contact between the adhesive and another surface. In layman’s terms, it was glue that didn’t stick very well. Simply put, it was a failure.

No one knew what to do with this stuff, but Silver was smart and didn't discard it. Then four years later, on a fateful Sunday morning in the North Presbyterian Church in North St. Paul, inspiration struck. Another 3M scientist named Arthur Fry was singing in the church's choir. He used markers to keep his place in the hymnal, but they kept falling out of the book. Remembering Silver's adhesive, Fry used some to coat his markers. Entrepreneurial success! With the weak adhesive, the markers stayed in place, yet lifted off without damaging the pages. The modern day Post-it Notes was born.

But many people don't realize that if it hadn't been for Silver's persistent optimism in his failed product, combined with Fry's belief in this new found application and 3M's long-standing policy that permits employees to spend fifteen percent of their time working on projects of their own choosing, the Post-it Note may never have happened.

3M began distributing Post-it Notes nationwide in 1980 -- ten years after Silver developed the super weak adhesive. Today, over 6 billion Post-it Notes are sold in more than 150 countries around the world.

So let us rejoice in the successful Chilean miner rescue and safe return of Chile’s 33 miners, relish in the wonder of space exploration through the Apollo 13 near disaster, and thank Art Fry and Spencer Silver for the Post-it Note’s that we all use every day.

Had failure been an option in these historical lessons of forced, purposeful innovation, our lives would all be very different today. Now that’s Thinking Big!

Written by Herb Sih, Managing Partner of Think Big Partners and bizperc, Kansas City's newest entrepreneurial resource.