As the world has gotten flatter, the places where products are ideated, designed, engineered, manufactured, distributed, marketed and sold have gotten further apart. Then add in trends and efforts like supply chain management, outsourcing, collaborations, alliances, joint ventures and customer focus.

It all means that there is either going to be a helluva lot more business travel (which there is), or there is going to be an explosion of phone traffic, which there is. And all THAT means there is going to be a great deal more videoconferencing. Video on the web is going to be huge… and that means cheaper for applications like this.

In this cast, we walk everyone through the basics of how to be effective in a videoconference, with some extra attention on video interviews. If you’re ready for an interview, you’ll be ready for a meeting.

A member kindly forwarded to us his corporate guidance regarding videoconferences. As I read it, it occurred to me that our focus in the cast was pretty narrow, and I may have assumed a couple of things that might be additional points for you to consider.

It reminded us to speak naturally. Maybe we implied that, but we weren’t as clear as we could have been. You don’t talk louder on a videoconference. That’s important.

“State your name and location before speaking.” I’ve seen it done both ways - with and without this. I think now that where I didn’t see it done, there was some connection already present. So, I think this is valuable for those vids where there are a lot of new faces. Please let us know your thoughts.

“Keep ‘mute’ activated when not speaking.” Boy, I didn’t like this one. This has, in my experience, led to too many situations where someone started talking and THEN de-activated the mute button. Frustrating. We just recommend you stay quiet… and remember that rustling papers CAN get picked up.

“Red and Black Bleed.” We talked about contrast, and I know red ties are fine, but I admit to completely forgetting that a female manager might very well wear a red suit. We’d recommend not for a vidconf. Red and black DO bleed.

It also had suggestions for visual aids. I urge you not to do this, but several folks have sent to me that their firm does. So, if you’re going to, here are some guidelines:

“Use bold 18 point or bigger, Arial or Times New Roman.”

I agree with the size, but not the typeface. Arial is a sans serif font - the characters don’t have the little feet on the bottom. Generally, sans serif is used for headlines, and serif fonts, like Times New Roman, is used for body text. (Check out a newspaper or a book). That said, when you get to 18 point type, you’re in headline country. Don’t use TNR…use Arial. (Or Verdana or Tahoma, if you want to be different).

“Use landscape format for printing.” This is QUITE good. When we read, we scan left to right, and generally longer lines of text are easier to read. If you have 18 point type, landscape is easier to read over a video connection.

This was helpful in several spots that we didn’t cover. Thanks for the input!

In today’s fast and flat world, ideas are becoming critical competitive advantages. Managers - and many others - need to be good at getting the most and best ideas from themselves and their teams.

And, if you ask a hundred managers what are some of the tools they might use to generate ideas, the ONLY tool that would get 100 votes is brainstorming. The funny thing is, we’ve been in lots of meetings where folks said that what they were doing was brainstorming, but it wasn’t. It was solution development, which is a completely different thing.

Since many managers don’t know how to lead a brainstorming session, this cast (the first of 2 parts) tells you how.

Note: Apologies to all on the audio quality of the show. Mike was on vacation, working with broken equipment, and a less-than-ideal recording environment. Despite all the audio editing and enhancements within our limited abilities, the audio quality falls short of our standards.

In today’s fast and flat world, ideas are becoming critical competitive advantages. Managers - and many others - need to be good at getting the most and best ideas from themselves and their teams.

And, if you ask a hundred managers what are some of the tools they might use to generate ideas, the ONLY tool that would get 100 votes is brainstorming. The funny thing is, we’ve been in lots of meetings where folks said that what they were doing was brainstorming, but it wasn’t. It was solution development, which is a completely different thing.

Today’s cast is part 2 of the 2-part series on Brainstorming.

Note: As was the case last time, apologies to all on the audio quality of the show. Next week we’ll be back to the studio (basement) … no more beach sounds in the background!

Running large meetings can sometimes seem like an arcane art. Fortunately, there are a number of simple practices that vastly improve your ability to present and communicate effectively. Over the course of the next several months, we will have a lot more to say about running large meetings and presentations, but today, we cover the first of these techniques — the Greeting.

We’ve alluded to it, we’ve talked about it, but we’ve never until now shared our recommendation for one of the few mandatory meetings we recommend: The Effective Manager’s Weekly Staff Meeting. We believe that a “Weekly Staff” and weekly one on ones are the core of running a team of directs. It’s one thing to meet with everyone individually, but Effective Managers know that there is a need for a socializing structure for the team as a unit.

And if you’ve ever HATED that “round robin” at the end of meetings, where no one really knows what to say, and everyone just wants the meeting to be over, we’ll tell you how to avoid THAT too.

During the podcast, we make reference to our previous shows on running effective meetings — the Effective Meeting Protocol (EMP). You’ll find those shows here:

• Effective Meetings, Part 1
• Effective Meetings, Part 2

Today, mark and I finish up our series on running your staff meeting. If you haven’t listened to last week’s show, you may want to do so.

During the show, we also allude once again to our previous podcasts on the Effective Meeting Protocol (or EMP). We did these shows back in August of 2005, so as we suggested last week, please visit our archives on the website if you haven’t listened to them.

You’ll find those shows here:

• Effective Meetings, Part 1
• Effective Meetings, Part 2

UPDATE: If you downloaded the podcast on Monday morning, it is likely you have a corrupted version of the podcast. Unless you like listening to the sound of chipmunks, you’ll probably want to re-download the podcast. If you are listening to the show in your browser and you previously downloaded the bad version, you must clear your browser cache, and in many cases, actually *close* your browser, restart it and then click on the play button. My apologies to all those impacted!

– Mike

This cast describes an effective way to take notes.

If you go to meetings all the time… no, wait. BECAUSE you go to meetings all the time, you need an effective way to take notes. There are certainly a LOT of different ways to do so, but if you ask a hundred or so executives, some common themes emerge about what works and why. For most of us, we write too much, and get too little value, for all the wrong reasons.

We figure, at 10 meetings a week - and we KNOW you go to more than that, it ends up being 5,000 meetings every decade… so maybe 25,000 meetings CONSERVATIVELY in your professional career.

In other words, whether you realize it or not, you need to be good at taking and using your notes.

This casts lays out our recommendations for an Effective Teleconference Meeting, or Conference Call.

We’ve been asked many times for this cast, and had intended to deliver it much earlier, but it kept getting pushed back. Teleconferences, or meetings conducted as conference calls, are much more widely used today than 20 years ago. Cost used to be an issue, but with costs moot, those very same savings have caused organizational dispersion that drive the teleconference’s ubiquity.

We are appalled at much of the guidance we hear. For instance: using mute while you have the speaker on. This is tantamount to encouraging Blackberry use in a face to face meeting, and laptops fully deployed and in email send/receive mode. What a waste! Somehow, because the COST of the call is free, we’ve lost sight of the VALUE of our time.

Get ready for a distinctly unique set of recommendations.

This week, we conclude our conversation on effective teleconferencing.

Both this week and last week, we make reference to our Effective Meetings podcast. If you haven’t listened to that show, we recommend highly that you do. All the recommendations we make there apply to teleconferences as well … I mean, you did get our point that teleconferences are meetings and not briefings, yes?