Page 191 - Becoming a Successful Manager

182 BUILDING ON YOUR FOUNDATION

Discovery Lesson 1

Pretend you are responsible for preparing for and conducting the sales
meeting described earlier. Note in your journal your schedule, agenda,
and other preparations that would help you elicit a “PIE” meeting.

Discovery Lesson 2

A large food and drug retailer found that their management meetings
were considered unproductive and expensive. They were not sure why,
but here was how they used to do it.
The company’s upper management hosted a meeting every Monday
at 1:00 P.M. The meetings were conducted over the company’s dedicated
VPN (virtual private network), which incidentally slowed down Internet
activity for anyone not in the meeting. Stores in remote locations across
the United States were required to connect as well. Upper management
would work through every agenda item, which, at times, took in excess
of two hours to complete. To complicate matters, the people in the cor-
porate offi ce talked at, not with, the site managers.
They described products, promotions, and procedures that headquar-
ters determined were most important. The managers sat in their offi ces
at each location and listened to these descriptions and edicts. At the end
of the meetings, participants were invited to send in questions if they had
them. Participating managers described these meetings as “boring, expen-
sive, and disrespectful.” Given what you know about effective meeting
management, describe the pieces that were missing from this “PIE.”