by John J. Walters<\/p>\n
I admit it.\u00c2\u00a0 The title is not clever at all, especially given that conference calls are just impersonal meetings (so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just stealing my own website\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s motto).\u00c2\u00a0 But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve tipped my hand.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve already given you posts on my two favorite meeting tricks: egg timers and talking sticks.\u00c2\u00a0 So what now?<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll tell you what now.\u00c2\u00a0 I complain.\u00c2\u00a0 And, truth be told, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have much to complain about.\u00c2\u00a0 The vast majority of my meetings have always been in person or one-on-one phone calls.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve only been involved in a handful of conference calls, and most of them have gone rather well.\u00c2\u00a0 So why complain?\u00c2\u00a0 I complain on your behalf — because I know the vast majority of conference calls suck.<\/p>\n
Recently, I was involved in a rather large conference call with my book team and two representatives from the publishing company.\u00c2\u00a0 That meant that there were nine people on the phone lines at once, which initially made me nervous.\u00c2\u00a0 Things actually ran fairly well, much to my surprise, so for your benefit (and my own as well) I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to conduct a quick and dirty postmortem.<\/p>\n
What Went Well<\/strong><\/p>\n What Went Not-So-Well<\/strong><\/p>\n In my search for ideas on improving conference calls, the<\/a> top<\/a> few<\/a> search<\/a> results<\/a> pretty much all say the same thing.\u00c2\u00a0 Two<\/a> articles<\/a> in particular stand out, mostly because they say the same things as the others but better in some way.\u00c2\u00a0 But the advice can be distilled down to a very short list:<\/p>\n\n
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