I am sitting here looking at the cute and compact soft cover book that AccuConference recently published. It goes by the impossibly long title of “Lessons From The Bored Room: How to avoid meeting monotony, be a better speaker and make your communication sing.”
With a paragraph-length title like that, I don’t really have to work very hard to summarize the subject matter for you! In 118 pages, authors Maranda Gibson, David Byrd, and George Page introduce tips and best practices for hosting and participating in various kinds of meetings. They also delve into presentation guidelines including speaking tips, effective written communications, creation of PowerPoint slides, and proper use of web conferencing technology to make your presentation.
It’s a nice fast overview of many different considerations for many different types of meeting scenarios. The level of practicality and wide-ranging nature of standard business meeting essentials would make this a great onboarding gift for new college hires or interns at a company. It would also be an excellent tool for non-confrontationally helping to modify bad habits in more experienced workers.
I’m very familiar with the content, as AccuConference asked me to write the forward for the book. I was happy to oblige, as I am a huge proponent of better presentation and meeting practices. I hate to disappoint the cynical among you, but no… I was not paid and I receive no cut of any revenues the book may gather. It was purely a matter of professional courtesy.
There’s not much in the way of revenues to talk about anyway. AccuConference is charging a small amount to cover printing and distribution costs (or Amazon’s merchant fees – I don’t know how that works). Amazon is famous for changing pricing on books without the author’s knowledge. As I write this, it costs $8.63 for the print edition and $6.99 for the Kindle edition.
According to an AccuConference blog post, the company will credit your conferencing account with $10 if you send them a receipt for your purchase. So in a sense, you can make money on the deal!
By the way, I was amused to see that Amazon included a “Search this book” link on their site that included my forward. If you click to look at the Table of Contents, the next few pages let you read my deathless prose in its entirety. My own little shot at digitized immortality. Enjoy!
