Are speed meetings the answer?

A curious application arrived recently at the United States Patent Office from a group of software developers at IBM. They had asked themselves this question: why is it that so many meetings go on for an hour, when they could be shorter?

The answer, they decided, was that this is the way most people break up their day. They arrange appointments to begin and end on the hour and co-ordinate their calendars and book conference rooms accordingly. It has nothing to do with the specific requirements of a meeting.

IBM's solution is software which offers people a range of meeting times. If all you need is five minutes, or 35, so be it. No need to invite people for the full hour. Everyone complains about meetings but here was a real attempt to re-organise the fundamental process by which they occur.

When so much communication is electronic, face-to-face meetings remain vital. It's no use saying all meetings are awful. Some things will just never happen unless you look someone in the eye.

How you organise those meetings depends on the kind of operation you run. The classic bad meeting involves six or more people sitting around a conference table with no real agenda.

Millions of hours of corporate time billow away in such pointless activity.

A few basic modifications, however, can vastly improve the usefulness of meetings. The first is to recognise how different people need to structure their time. One distinction is between "managers" and "makers". Managers tend to have many decisions to make during each day, lots of data to collect and a long checklist to work through. They need to move from one thing to another to get everything done.

Makers, however, work on longer projects and need larger chunks of time. A software developer, for example, may need entire days free of appointments and distractions to complete a project. Schedule a mid-morning meeting and their attention is shot. You wouldn't ask Damien Hirst to drop his brush and pop in for an hour's chat about his gallery's fee structure.

There is no point berating your staff in meetings for not doing enough when what they need most is fewer meetings. With "makers", it might be best only scheduling meetings in one half of the day, so that they have the other half clear to gain momentum in their work.

At an American website called meetordie.com, you can enter your industry, the length of your meeting and the number and roles of the participants. It then spits out an estimate of the amount of money being wasted by the meeting, and a suggestion for how it might be better spent. On drinking water for Africans, for example.

Ricardo Semler, a Brazilian industrialist and author of The Seven Day Weekend, proposes not requiring anyone to show up to meetings. If you call one, and people come, the meeting is worthwhile. If no one comes, it tells you it was a waste of time in the first place.