A Spoonful of Medicine for Sick Meetings
March 03, 2008
Imagine you could take your meetings to the doctor. A proper doctor in a white coat, no less. What if he could look at the symptoms, and tell you what's wrong—why your meetings are boring, inconclusive, draining, over-populated, rushed, and scary—and give you a cure to heal them.
That's what David Pearl of the David Pearl Group claims he can do. Pearl, also artistic director of Impropera, a company that improvises operas from scratch, says he just likes to make life more enjoyable. The Meeting Hospital is where he does his "doctoring." Using his theatrical skills, Pearl teaches methods to improve meetings while he entertains learners.
He calls this process "applied arts," where comedy meets business, or simply an entertaining way of looking at a serious subject. All great business people, Pearl contends, are performers who need entertainment skills to communicate, control, and be remembered and more effective.
Pearl, a performer since his debut at age nine with Placido Domingo at Covent Garden, says the communication skills you learn as a performer can be applied to work, and in particular, meetings. What else is a meeting, he asks, than people communicating (performing) to each other (their audience) in order to convey a specific message? Like a stage performance, for instance, the ambience and setting are essential to delivering that message in a concise, rewarding, and useful way.
The Meeting Hospital program challenges participants over the course of three months. It comprises a full day followed by three months of bi-weekly personal prompts to remind those struggling with failing meetings to keep trying while offering tips for a speedy recovery.
To learn the details on Pearl's presentation and process for meeting improvement, contact Sharon Kean at 020 7354 3574, e-mail her at Sharon@keanlanyon.com, or visit www.davidpearlgroup.com.
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