Filed in archive
Venture Capital
by tj on January 29, 2005
Brad Feld is writing about the ideal board meeting:
Being CTO of my ex-company I found board meeting most often an excellent waste of time. Too many people that wanted to praise their ego. Many participants that were not really prepared and a long day without much news. No doubt they are necessary but focus should be talking facts instead of dancing around it for 6 hours and flying home late...
"5 minutes: administrative items (approve the minutes, approve new options).
- 55 minutes: Department updates. We used the board package as
the guide, but each exec spent a few minutes summarizing key points
(rather than reading from the package) and then we drilled into Q&A
and discussion on each area. It was a spirited discussion that
was forward looking (e.g. "what are we doing in the next 30 days about
issue X") rather than backward looking (e.g. "good job on doing Y last
month.") - 90 minutes: 2005 Strategic Priorities. We worked from a six
page powerpoint presentation (that had crappy production value, but was
high content value) and spent 80% of our time on one slide. The
entire leadership team participated in the discussion -- it wasn't a
"presentation of a conclusion" but a "discussion about what to do given
limited resources and divergent opportunities." - 30 minutes: Executive Session (Board Only). We talked about a
handful of personnel related issues, summarized the discussion, and set
the tone for Q105."
Being CTO of my ex-company I found board meeting most often an excellent waste of time. Too many people that wanted to praise their ego. Many participants that were not really prepared and a long day without much news. No doubt they are necessary but focus should be talking facts instead of dancing around it for 6 hours and flying home late...
Permalink: the ideal board meeting
Trackback: http://publish.creative-weblogging.com/publish/mt-tb.pl/4767
Addthis
Ask
Blinklist
del.icio.us
Digg
Fark
Facebook
Google
Lycos
Ma.gnolia
Mr Wong
Netscape
Netvousz
Newsvine
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Slashdot
Tailrank
Technorati
Wink
Yahoo
Vote for the ideal board meeting:
|
Rating: 6.00 out of 3 vote(s) cast.
|
Subscribe
Use the search to look for other interesting posts
| RSS |  See all blog subscribe options |
 What is RSS? | |
| Yahoo! |
|
| Addthis |
|
| Bloglines |
|
| Newsletter | |
| Follow us on Twitter! |
