Topless Meetings Follow-Up

Hello: This is a follow-up to the topless meetings post. I did some searching and found a some past posts, etc about meetings. This seems to be a popular topic.

I wonder about a few things, if anyone cares to comment on any of them:

What about bringing the meeting to people where they are – online chat rooms and the like?

Most importantly, how do you decide when to have a meeting? I’m going to try and find some research on this – but I worked for a past employer who seemed to distribute by e-mail those things in which people were most interested/invested and about which they would have the most questions/feedback, and tended to have meetings for information that should’ve been distributed by e-mail or some other less time-consuming, more passive means.

Of course most places I’ve been I’ve sat through boring, tedious and unstructured meetings, or meetings where a lot needed to get done but we never got past the first agenda item, etc. It occurs to me, though, that I have no clue how to run a good meeting. It’s one of those ubiquitous facts of professional life for which nobody seems to have specific training!