The Seven Deadly Sins of Buinsess Meetings

Saunders Critical Thinking Mod 4

Seven Deadly Sins of Business Meetings

While not terribly recent, the meeting that first comes to mind for this assignment was the Annual National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Meeting. This was a gathering of attendees from every state Highway Transportation Division and was sponsored by the Federal NHTSA agency. It was held in Phoenix, AR at a very luxurious resort and all of the national dignitaries such as Secretary Slater of the Department of Transportation and his cabinet were there. The intent was to inform all the states of progress in national initiatives, reveal the new Telly award-winning National Work Zone Safety campaign (that my company had created for the Department of Transportation), share best practices between states and hopefully encourage good will and harmony between all states and the federal government. The meeting was carefully planned and the presenters (including myself) had carefully prepared. Despite the best efforts, tensions were soon running high and the meeting was soon running on a destructive downward spiral due to the tensions between the states and the Federal government. States in general do not like to have anything mandated or even “heavily recommended” to them by the federal government and my National Work zone Safety campaign was a prime example. Even though the campaign had won the highest national marketing award as the best outreach campaign of the year, individual states didn’t want to use it because they felt the government was acting like it was doing them a favor with this PR Campaign and they didn’t want the feds telling them what to do. I was all dressed up in my dignified little suit and heels and got in front of an increasingly upset group where I outlined the new campaign by showing the television and radio commercials, posters, etc., demonstrating the quantitative data proving the campaign would save each state over a million dollars per work zone death, and...