Lynette Mong of the Omnivoracious blog interviews Al Pittampalli about his new book “Read this Before Our Next Meeting.” Some of the points he makes in his book:

• “We have too many meetings.”
• “We have too many bad meetings.”
• “Traditional meetings create a culture of compromise.” (The wrong people or too many people leads to inability to act or decide.) 
• “Traditional meetings kill our sense of urgency... Regularly interrupting the day to bring our best minds together to focus on the urgent makes it impossible for these people to spend their focused energy on what’s actually important.”

He defines what a meeting is and isn’t. His premise is to stop wasting everyone’s time with ineffective meetings and to rethink meetings and how you perceive meetings. He states, "the quality of your meetings is the quality of your organization."

Do you see these things happening in your organization? What have you done to optimize meetings? 

A new survey of 350 business travel buyers reveals that 53 percent are now responsible for meetings spend, but only 55 percent still lack a strategic meetings management policy. The survey was conducted by the Business Travel and Meetings Show, as reported by Conworld.

This will surely change in 2011, as meeting professionals must embrace "smarter" meetings. In the first One+ article in our FutureWatch 2011 feature series, meeting pros discuss the importance of planning events that are well-targeted in terms of size, location, content and attendance, as well as the need to quantify meetings-derived ROI.