Make decision-meetings decide things

Seth Godin, self-styled author and agent of change (a business thinking guru) recently blogged "At Ford, they used to have meetings to prepare for meetings, just to be sure everyone had their story straight."

My response to that is: I know, it's true, I was there, we called them pre-meetings. I also wondered whether it was appropriate to use the past tense... :o)

Seth Godin's blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ suggested nine good strategies to make meetings work well.

Here's another idea for successful decision-meeting success:

Some meetings are intended to make decisions, to get answers to questions. So the agenda should not be a list of subjects for discussion (that's too open-ended, and helps generate never-ending meetings). If a meeting is to make a decision, then it's likely that the decision is an answer to a question. So the agenda should be a list of questions, to which the meeting must find an answer. And you must minute the answers generated by the meeting.

Otherwise, you failed to meet the objective of the meeting.