The $100 Billion Collaboration Stimulus Plan of 2009 – Part 1
Alan Cohen, VP Enterprise Marketing, Cisco Systems
"Can you come to a meeting right now." "No, it's almost lunch time. If I miss lunch myday will be 12 hours of uninterrupted misery."
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The Boss and DilbertInspiration hits you at unusual times. I was standing in front of the Cisco TelepresenceExperience at the NBA All Star game last weekend (February 7-8)http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/prod_021309c.html-- watching a long line of fansstand in line to have virtual face-to-face meetings with players like Steve Nash and KevinDurant, or chat with local sportscasters engaging them in trivia contests -- when I realizedthis inspiring experience was enabling a once in a lifetime opportunity for the 900+ people who queued up for the opportunity. They could get closer to an NBA player thanthey ever imagined. Imagine meeting with your CEO or your customer’s?The best-known
justifications
benefit
of this technology is the meeting experience itself; that is, the full engagement employees bring to these meetings. If reduced travel time and expense is the locomotive,engagement is the freight of the Telepresence train.http://www.thetransnational.travel/news.php?cid=Cisco-virtual-meeting-telepresence.Feb-09.11 Contrast this with the plethora of meetings you attend on a daily basis. How many of themeetings you attend would you classify as inspiring? How many would you call productive? Or fun?For us mere mortals, no one -- and I mean no one -- does a better job of demonstratingthe odd zeitgeist of the numbing meeting culture than Scott Adams, the well-knowncreative genius behind the daily cartoon Dilbert.
http://www.dilbert.com/All of us in theknowledge worker class relate to Adam’s razor-sharp depiction of the energy-sapping lossof time and motivation resulting from bad meetings.
Thus I declare it’s time. It’s time, to paraphrase
Hamlet
, “to take arms against a sea of inane meetings and end it all with solutions.”Particularly during these challenging economic times, when companies are trying to savetheir capital, unlock their employees’ potential and drive true customer intimacy, thefinancial overhead of bad meetings is too expensive for any company to suffer.
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Blogger’s note: Scott Adams and I live in the same town in the East Bay. We both worked earlier in our careers as financial analysts and have worked in the network department of a phone company. Any other resemblances are not intentional and all names have been changed to protect the innocent – mostly me.
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