Chapter 8 | BUSINESS MEETINGS AND NEGOTIATIONS After completing this chapter, you should be able Pr I Understand the preparations required Understand formal meeting procedures. Ceres fora meeting. I Greate an agenda for a meeting and ‘The fewer the ineetings, 1 Describe the key atrbutes ofa success: take down the minutes. the better. ful meeting. 1 Deal with disruptions that might occur Peter Drucker! Distinguish between the various types. during a meeting. of meetings I Understand what negotiation is, and I. Know the various terminologies used negotiate successfully. uring meetings. INTRODUCTION In today’s business culture, information flow is critical and organizations can ill afford to waste time revisiting issues repeatedly. Good meetings can accelerate the collective decision making process and improve execution. Poorly conducted meetings, on the other hand, increase costs and waste the valuable time of participants. “There is evidence to suggest that more meetings are now being held than ever before. In 1990, twas estimated that there were 25 million meetings worldwide on a single day. Five years later, this figure rose to 50 million Most executives are in some sort of meeting for more than half their business day. The average number of meetings attended in a week is on 4 steady rise, and business professionals devote a chunk of their working hours to attending various kinds of meetings. MEETINGS: A WASTE OF TIME? ‘Though meetings are a way ofife in organizations of every size and kind, nobody seems very happy with them. Dull, ineffective, useless, and failing to live up to expectations are some of the epithets reserved for meetings. They are considered to be a waste of time, an inter- ruption, and merely an opportunity for supervisors to deliver ineffective lectures to subor- dinates. People even end up wanting to take their work to meetings so that thei time is not completely wasted. ‘A report in Public Relations Tactics reveals that a typical professional attends more than 60 meetings in a month. This study suggests that American businesses “face a situation of ‘meeting mania” as 46 per centof professionals are attending more meetings than they did last yar The study also predicts an increase in this figure within the next few years. Large corpo- tations are having more meetings than their smaller counterparts. Even where meetings are ‘not conducted face to face, video conferencing and, toa lesser extent, audio conferencing are sed to organize meetings. Research studies have raised serious concerns regarding meetings. One report says that although alittle more than a quarter of attendees interviewed expressed strong dissatisfaction with the meeting process (especially the “ineffective speaking skills” oftheir team leaders),