Better meetings through devotion to facts based on reading during the meeting

The legendary Prof. Edward Tufte, interviewed for MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 38, argues that meetings are more efficient if members devote much of their time during them to reading.. “I like enforced reading in meetings.”

A corollary of reading is that people are pushed to prepare their thoughts ahead of time and commit them to paper. People waffle less and will be more cogent in their arguments. Meetings run this way are more participative and shorter, but people do have to work harder to prepare. They actually have to think about the topic of the meeting. How extraordinarily demanding (See my post of April 22, 2007: meetings with 9 references.)!