[sriram_malhar]

Fully agree with the article's focus on proper meeting discipline.

This can be coupled with Edward Tufte's suggestions on how to present at a meeting. To summarize, he says that there is no point sending a presentation in advance .. most will not read it anyway. Instead of a presentation, write about 5-6 six pages of prose and hand them out at the beginning of the meeting. Every one will scan the document in their own ways and write up questions. After 20 minutes or so, start discussing the document. This way, the presenter doesn't have to drone on about things that everyone knows, and one can focus on real questions.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/files/Consume_Produce_14_15.pdf

[xingped]

Haha, you say that, but from years of personal experience with this meeting style, what really happens is you end up getting a lot of questions which are clearly answered further up/down in the document or questions which are completely pointless or nonsensical to ask but people like to just be heard and make themselves look good for having something to say.

[sriram_malhar]

I hear you, which is where one needs a no-nonsense moderator who will say “that has been answered on page 1”, and who has the authority to shut down the high caucus noisy people

[throwaway4aday]

This is really just wasting 20 minutes, it's much better to have a clear agenda which is basically in the form of bullet point notes that most people would make outlining the important topics and questions. Then just go through the agenda providing a brief elaboration on each topic and take questions, get agreement, write down the conclusion and move on. If the meeting is purely informational then in most cases you shouldn't even have a meeting.

[sriram_malhar]

Tufte makes a decent case for why it should be prose. But then, as an academic, it comes easy to him.

As you say, sufficiently self-descriptive bullet points should communicate equally well.

I find that whenever I go to that level of detail, I end up mentally with a prose narration at the leaf level, so I transfer that to the doc. This fills in some important connectives, such as "finally", "on the other hand" and asides such as "this is a minor point that should not affect the final outcome". This is helpful for people who may not have you around to explain. I also tweak that document after the meeting to fill in answers to questions that were asked.

Equally, for an important meeting, it is not enough to be an agenda. The content is important. The audience for the presentation should be people who are not in the meeting, but could have been (people on vacation, people promoted to the appropriate level, future hires).

[spencerchubb]

To my knowledge, the 6-pager was popularized by Bezos. It requires the document to be very well written, or else the 6-pager will be wasting the readers' time. It also requires strong reading comprehension, which frankly, most employees do not. It works well for Amazon execs because they are all sharp