Now that everyone is working remotely, people are starting to realize how much they took meetings for granted. Our guest this week on CTO Connection is Douglas Ferguson, President of Voltage Control. Voltage Control’s mission is to rid the world of horrible meetings. So how do you transform ineffectual meetings to something of greater value?

Douglas talked to Peter about his 10 mantras for meetings that work. Some include ideas like ‘no purpose, no meeting’ and ‘embrace the child’s mind’. Tune in to learn how to make meetings work for your team.

• [01:34] - Ridding the world of horrible meetings
• [04:29] - Durable decisions
• [08:59] - The 10 meeting mantras
  • [09:09] - No purpose, no meeting
  • [10:18] - Disagree and commit
  • [17:58] - Bring your best self
  • [23:08] - Do the work in the meeting
  • [26:59] - Foster emotional safety
  • [28:09] - Capture room intelligence
  • [30:32] - Embrace the child's mind
  • [35:45] - Respect everyone's time
  • [36:46] - Decide what not to do
  • [38:08] - Debrief for durability
• [39:42] - Meeting about meetings

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services(AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to [email protected] if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating, or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

Podcast episode production by Dante32.