It's official: MEETINGS MAKE YOU STUPID

[The Waiting Hurts]

Ok, well maybe not official official but the internet along with some scientist can't be wrong.

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/177...ake-you-stupid

Now there's some science behind what every cube dweller has known for years: Meetings are worthless and, in fact, are counterproductive.
A scientific study asked participants to think of as many brands of soft drinks as they could. When part of a group, the participants' final list was shorter than the lists from participants working alone who were asked to do the same thing. This MSNBC story is light on details of the study, but you get the idea: Groupthink extends beyond the swaying of opinions toward a homogenized central viewpoint, even reaching into basic tasks like making lists of facts.
Naturally, this contradicts generations of research that say groups come up with better decisions than individuals. I remember my first day of business school, where our "organizational behavior" class was asked to individually rank a list of 15 items from most important to least important that we would find useful when stranded in a frozen wilderness. We then did the same task in groups of five. Compared to the "expert" list, groups had, on average, slightly better results... however I've always felt those results were flawed. (I deemed a bottle of whiskey much more important than the experts because I thought it might help in starting a fire, for example.)
But the bigger problem with the group results was that it didn't offer any outlet for those who had exceptional ideas: Several people in the class outscored the average by quite a bit, and their scores were brought down by the group project. As a business manager, you should ask yourself: Do you want to seek out these exceptional staff members? Or do you let everyone throw a bunch of random ideas into a pot and wait for something tolerable to rise to the top?
Of course, some meetings are necessary as a means of getting information out to a large number of people at once, but when it comes to brainstorming and creativity, you might be better off letting people work alone.

Feel free to email this to your boss right away.

[Jack]

Meetings are worthless and, in fact, are counterproductive.

Amen brother.

Or perhaps most people who like to "work in groups" are those who can't handle the task on their own to begin with.

[_BullDog_]

[Loner]

I learned this in a managerial psychology class I took in 1992. This isn't news.

[HangerAngler]

Woah. We should combine the internet with scientists more often.

[Phil]

Meetings are useful for disseminating the same info from one person to many people.

But they are bad for combining the information from many people into one unified thought, because sometimes the loudest people in the meeting have the dumbest thoughts and those are the thoughts that get to be part of the "Central" thought.

[Will Durant]

Dilbert postulates that the folks with the largest bladder-to-brain ratio carry the day in meetings.

My experience would tend to support this theory. Or perhaps the loudness-to-intelligence idea postulated by Phil.

It's all so dependant on the participants of said meetings.

From where I sit in the office, I can hear a lot of meetings at various cubicles and offices nearby (awesome spot!). But sometimes it's so freakin' painful to listen to some of what goes on. Far too many people seem to subscribe to the idea that if you're not sure about the answer, you should keep talking about everything you kind-of-know and maybe you'll hit on the right answer eventually.

[The Waiting Hurts]

Originally Posted by mexx

Far too many people seem to subscribe to the idea that if you're not sure about the answer, you should keep talking about everything you kind-of-know and maybe you'll hit on the right answer eventually.

It's what all successful executive do....key to the corporate ladder.