Meeting Deja Vu

I participated in a meeting this past week.

I exited the meeting with a feeling that we hadn't accomplished much. Certainly the challenges were laid out and a couple of suggestions were raised. Some attendees decided that additional information was required.

What was missing?

For starters, we made the cardinal sin of declaring the meeting over before we assigned specific "to dos" and deadlines. There were no specific action plans to advance a solution.

Afterwards, I mentioned this to a colleague who had also attended. His response surprised me.

"I've worked here for ten years and have attended that meeting at least ten times before".

Very telling.

Has this ever happened to you? Ask yourself the following questions.

1. Are you taking comfort in activity vs. accomplishments? i.e. If we're meeting, we're doing something about it. Even if we aren't.

2. Are you executing well? Setting tasks, assigning responsibilities, establishing deadlines?

3. Is the meeting topic important, but not urgent? Perhaps the topic is important enough to draw ten people into a meeting, but doesn't make it to our individual top three tasks once we return to our desks.

4. Who is in charge? Who owns the initiative? We assembled a group of independent people (each responsible for a different product line or sales channel) but we weren't working within a common strategic plan under the guidance of a VP of Sales.

If you answered Yes to any of the above questions, you're suffering from Meeting Deja Vu.

Now that you recognize the disease, how are you going to treat it? Here's a suggestion.

Prairie Dogging Innovation

It seems to me that the speed of innovation is accelerating and I'm not sure businesses are prepared to leverage that fact.

It was a scant two years ago, for example, that the iPhone was introduced. Two years later, there are over 20,000 apps available for it.

But who has the time to understand what they all do? Fact is that more apps are introduced each day than we can keep track of. Some would write off many applications as flashlight apps (basically screensavers), some will use a selection of productivity applications.

But others might uncover opportunities to innovate at the speed of light.

Let me cite a personal example. Our sales manager wanted to create a contest to engage everyday shoppers around the world to help our company spot marketing opportunities. Basically the goal of this contest is lead generation.

It is a radically different idea than we've ever tried before.

Unfortunately, we were struggling with the technology to achieve it. We didn't want to spend too much money or time to put it all together. So we put the idea on the back burner.

Yesterday I was reading one of my favourite tech blogs, where they profiled a new iPhone application, so I thought I'd check it out. Turns out this application provides us with about 90% of the functionality we need to execute our new lead generation idea.

So, about 30 minutes after the technical article had been published, I was able to download, test and evaluate the application, then write it's author to setup a meeting for next week. Probably with a few hours coding, we could have exactly what we need.

All of this activity happened between 7 am and 8 am on a Saturday morning.

The point of all this, is that it can't happen unless your organization has "Prairie Dogs", who pop their heads up from time to time to stay alert to new innovations, technologies and possibilities.

Secondly, they need to be "turned on" (engaged), with what your company is trying to achieve.

If you have these two ingredients, plus some freedom to execute, there's no telling how quickly your company will be able to innovate.

Executing vs. Innovating

If you were starting up a competing business to the one you're in today, how would you do it?

Unless you were well capitalized, resources (people, time and money) would be scarce.

So what would you do?

Chances are, it's not what you're doing today.

Trade Shows would not likely make the list, since they're very expensive to display at and in this economy, who's going to spend the money to attend?

Expensive and gimmicky corporate websites probably won't make the list either, since they take some time and considerable expense to develop.

Perhaps a printed customer or industry focused Newsletter? Not likely, because you can't measure whether they got delivered or even if they're read.

As a former Marketer myself, I completely understand and respect that "momentum" has a significant impact on a Marketing schedule.

It's time to prep for the next catalog.
The quarterly newsletter is due next week.
We need to put together the booth for the next Trade Show.
Where is the Marketing collateral for our new whatchamacallit?
The web stats need to be reported.
Time to get those leads entered into the CRM system.

Really, there's no time to try something new....unless you stop something old. We get caught up in the cycle of executing, rather than spending time innovating.