Improving meetings with ROTI

There are two things people seam to love at Microsoft; Meetings and email. The latter needs a quick mentioning; there is definitely a culture at Microsoft where a lot of people tend to send email rather than walk a few meters to somebody else's office and actually talk to them. Enough about that. Meetings... I'm not sure Microsoft is any worse than other big companies but at times the calendar looks like a puzzle. A solved puzzle. And the higher up you get in the food chain, the more meetings you have. If I want a meeting with my manager's manager I usually need to plan 3-4 weeks ahead. Or ask him to make room for me.

So with a lot of meetings I think it is important to not waste the time of the participants. I always try to invite the right people rather than everybody who might be interested. But then there is the question about content. Sometimes I walk out of a meeting with a feeling that I wasted some participants time. But now I have a tool that will convert that feeling into facts; ROTI. OK, I must confess I haven't actually tried it yet. I keep getting this vision of everybody in the meeting look at me as if I've gone completely mad... But I'll find a good situation to use this and report back on how it went. Because it makes sense to me to have a small retrospect to improve the meeting.