Advice on Business from Lucia

Here is some more of my famous business advice:

1)      No meeting should take place without an agenda and some follow up afterwards. If the meeting doesn’t require these things then YOU DON’T NEED THE MEETING! Go immediately to a bar and just hang out for an hour. Everyone will be more satisfied with the use of the time.

a.       In this same vein, don’t send out a meeting request with only a vague title as the purpose/agenda for the meeting. I don’t know what you mean by “Future Strategies”.

2)      If I send you an agenda for a meeting – could you read it? Thanks.  – double clicking on an attachment is hard, but not impossible.

3)      Once you have read the agenda, you should realize that the entire point of the meeting is you giving me information. The meeting will go more smoothly if you gather this information ahead of time. And come prepared.

4)      If you refuse to read the agenda or come prepared with the information that is the core purpose of the meeting, you should feel bad. You should not just blink at me when I ask you for the information. Is a little shame too much to ask?

5)      When I send out the notes from a meeting with your tasks to complete highlighted and with a small checkbox next to them, it means you should do them. By the date in the notes.

6)      I am not “forcing dates on you” (as I overheard you say to your coworkers), we all agreed on the dates in the meeting.

7)      When, at the next meeting, I ask the status of your tasks (per the friggin agenda!), don’t say that you will set up a meeting to take care of it. That isn’t going to have it done by last Thursday. At a minimum you should have read the agenda, felt ashamed that you didn’t even start your task from the last meeting, and set up that meeting already.

8)      When you miss a milestone and I call you out on it, don’t say, well, what is the drop dead date on that task? I didn’t put the date on that milestone so you would have a date to miss, I calculated when you had to have this done to complete all the other tasks. Geez. And, if we push it back to a later date, well, that means that you will have to do other tasks faster. Which you can’t do, I know you.

9)      If you miss that second date (let’s use the example of a spreadsheet compiled by 10-31-07, but you missed that and wanted till 2-15, but your meeting isn’t even set up until 2-15 and you know you can’t get it done on that day…) don’t ask me for the drop dead date. Dude, you are already dead.