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David Harper, CFA, FRM's avatar

This is excellent, thank you for illustrating a key challenge for creatives that is "especially problematic in a remote-first world". My business was recently acquired, and you've described the challenge better than anyone else I've read (you are hardly the first to notice an underlying problem that also might present as zoom fatigue but is actually over-indexing on zoom meetings). In terms of solutions, I have two thoughts although not anything like an answer (my new company's zoom meeting tendency remains a "tax" on my creative work). First, I think it helps to distinguish between different TYPES of meetings; a taxonomy of meeting types helps us to parse their importance, eg., I know that a "roundtable" does not need me. Second, and I think this is the more profound dynamic: we are not going to need many of these meetings. Technology changes what it means to be social. Here we can look to Asana (and its category of project managers like wrike, which we use and is the best piece of software that I've ever encountered) which is disrupting what it means for an organization to work together (e.g, asana's work graph https://blog.asana.com/2013/11/workgraph/). Put another way, even managers will need to learn how to "become a bit more like developers" as organizations who disrupt (and speed is an enabler of disruption) will find that shrinking the time spent on traditional meetings will help them win.

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Emily Ritter's avatar

Give the people what they want! Mr Worldwide!

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