Since May 26th I’ve been traveling; first to Munich, then to Tbilisi (in Georgia), and then to Milan where I will be keynoting a conference on the future of work mid June. Thus far it’s been an exciting trip. My family is actually from Tbilisi and hasn’t been back in almost 40 years so my grandmother, mother, and now fiancee (who I proposed to in Tbilisi) traveled there to see where they grew up and what has changed. Georgia is a beautiful place but there is a of corruption and political instability which leads to a high unemployment rate and poverty level. One of the things that the current president of Georgia did was to create a glass administration building so people could see what goes on at the government level. It’s not purely transparent from the outside but I’m told that once you go into the building it’s easy to see into offices and rooms throughout the building. That got me thinking, how open is too open?
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I am not too sure whether meetings lower our IQ or whether they make us all more stupid, as my good friend Stowe Boyd reflected on a recent blog post, but I can certainly confirm they do take a toll on your own productivity. Specially, when those meetings are not set up by you, but by everyone else, and therefore making you lose the control, once again, in terms of one of the most precious things all of us, knowledge workers, have that we don’t seem to treasure well enough: Time. Attention management, indeed, is the new currency and it looks like meetings want to keep having that special place in our day to day workload in terms of grabbing most of it: our attention, that is. But perhaps enough is enough. Just like 5 years ago I started challenging the status quo of corporate email with the “A World Without eMail” movement, I think this week it’s a good time to start its follow-up: Life Without Meetings.
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Over the past 5 years I’ve given a few hundred presentations in front of crowds from 10 to 1,000.
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If you want better results from your presentations, I know you will find this post useful.
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One thing that’s undeniable about millennials: They’re a ferocious bunch. You will be hard-pressed to meet a millennial in this industry who isn’t angling for that corner office job at the tender age of 25.
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Today’s post is all about how to make better business decisions, by filtering the advice and information you receive.
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