To put it lightly, I have a non-traditional office environment. It is not a buttoned up place. It's a profanity laced, fun-loving, spur of the moment setting that can easily lead to hours of non-productivity. And it cuts both ways. It's not always fun. We are also easily caught up in the issue of the moment, allowing meetings to follow tangents completely unrelated to the agenda at hand.

Recently, I was conducting such a meeting. We were gathered to discuss the marketing and operations of a new kitchen and chef's table we're building. We had most of our top people in the room. However, we had received a guest complaint just before the meeting via one of our investors (a complaint that later turned out to be mostly erroneous). We were all spooled up, both about the complaint itself and the pejorative manner in which it was sent. To say we climbed the ladder would be a gross misrepresentation - we had ridden the express elevator to the top of the anger scale. But it wasn't getting anywhere...

So 15 minutes into our tirade, I paused everyone. I reminded us of why we were there. I asked everyone to drop the issue of the complaint. And then I led us through a quick breathing exercise - a la the teleclasses - and re-focused us on the agenda of our meeting. It was great to teach everyone recalibration, but also to use it real time.

Now, I'm going for a two for one on this post. Following the recalibration, I went through the steps of execution module (I had just re-read it). Ultimately, ending up with committed action from everyone in the room as it related to their specific jobs on the project.

It was a meeting that would not have been nearly that successful 9 months ago, or perhaps even possible at all.

-Elliot