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Too often, business meetings suck. They don’t have to. Meeting hosts can help build trust in the process by being mindful of Purpose, People, and Process. Meeting participants, in turn, have a responsibility to be Prepared, Prompt, and Present. Effective—even energizing—meetings are the result.

Proximity or propinquity may be necessary to instill a sense of community, but they aren’t sufficient. Communities are purposeful. That may be particularly true of successful online communities.

Effective meetings have a clear purpose. Agendas and patterns of conversation that send mixed messages—however inadvertently—are likely to undermine the achievement of that purpose.

Research supports the contention that success is a product of failing better and faster than your competition. Persistence is necessary but insufficient. You must learn efficiently from failure and act quickly on what you learn.

A learning community host must be a recognized member of the community, must have deep, practical experience, and must be able to articulate a coherent theoretical framework.

A facilitation process or collaboration tool used in a meeting have value in context, and the context is determined by the purpose of, and people in, each individual meeting.

Technology mediation requires the timely execution of many tasks. If you aren’t careful, you can be overwhelmed by the administrative demands of community management. Automate what should be automated in order to free your time to focus on high-value human interaction.

What if business meetings were something you looked forward to? Maggie Chumbley explains how small shifts in how you approach meetings can yield big differences in outcomes.

Learning communities can offer the effectiveness of classroom learning with the accessibility of timeliness and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) at a reasonable cost in time and money. By designing and hosting a learning community, you can help your clients and prospects develop the wisdom to use your services and products effectively. Their success translates into valuable relationships.

The logic of investing in customer success is straightforward and compelling. By investing in customer success, you can reduce customer churn and increase the number of active customers over time. Other factors held equal, more customers means more revenue, and more revenue means more value. But, we’re missing something: the cost of customer success. How might we evaluate the trade-offs that are too often sidestepped?