Honey, I shrunk the meeting!

After yet another prolonged and wasteful meeting, I came up with an idea for an elevator-style pitch meeting. Just think about it. If an entrepreneur can explain to a VC in 30 seconds what his or her company does, why can't a corporate employee give a status update in 30 seconds or less?

Here's how you would go about shrinking your meeting in 6 simple steps.

1. Find somebody with a stopwatch. Ideally, this person is the boss (you'll also need to sell the idea to him or her first). The boss may choose to delegate the stopwatch duties to a corporate peon (that's what interns are for!).

2. Anybody presenting in the meeting gets 30 seconds. This will force people to think hard about what they want to say during the meeting and focus on the most important messages. No more verbose Powerpoint slides!

3. As people speak, everybody just listens and takes notes. No questions are asked until the last presenter is finished.

4. After every presenter is done, a 5-10 minute Q&A session follows (the duration depends on the number of presenters; 5 presenters - 5 minutes). Everybody in the room gets an opportunity to ask one question in 30 seconds or less. They can ask any presenter.

5. The presenter has 30 seconds to answer the question.

6. After the questions are asked, the meeting is over. However, the room should remain booked for another 10 minutes to allow people to connect directly.

Try this approach, shrink your 1 hour time-sucking meeting into a 15-20 minute high-impact communication session and share the results on this blog. To gain additional inspiration, listen to one of my band's songs Stupid Meetings.