7/29/2019 How to Make Your Meetings Fun
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How to Make Your Meetings Fun!
by Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE
If you want people to be creative, innovative, and flexible, it
helps to make your meetings fun.Here are three examples.
A QUIZ SHOWBefore I spoke at a small meeting for USA Today, the
organizers conducted a
quiz show. This was a great icebreaker and also served to
educate their employees, using
questions like: Who writes the editorial column on page 13? What
is our distribution inCleveland? What was the headline on the Life
SyleSection last Tuesday? Small prizes like
USA Today pens and note pads were awarded. This got the audience
laughing while learning
(and had the audience fully warmed up when I came on).
THE PRIORITIES GAMEAnother time I was speaking at Levi Strauss.
There were six tables,
each with eight sales people. Each table received copies of the
same thirteen examples of typicalpaperwork that crosses a
salespersons desk each day. They then debated the priority
forhandling them. This was a great way to find out how the sales
people thought and for
management to teach them priorities. I was as amazed as
management was at how many different
opinions there were on handling the same thirteen items.
OSCARS A Pacific Bell meeting was held around the time of the
Academy Awards. The
creative meeting planner set up an awards ceremony and asked the
managers to wear formal
evening dress. This sounded so creative to me that, even though
my speech was later in the day, I
wanted to be part of it (at no extra cost to the client). Oscars
were given out in categories like
customer service, sales, and money-making ideas. Wearing an
evening gown, I sashayed across
the stage to deliver the envelopes containing the names of the
winners. As the nominees in eachcategory were announced, a giant
video screen showed their photos. The first two were always
famous movie stars, the third an employee. Would you believe it?
Pacific Bell employees beat
out the movie stars every time! Everyone who accepted an Academy
Award had to give a short
speech. It was innovative, memorable, and fun.
This gave me the idea for my fifteenth speech for the
Continental Breakfast Club (CBC). The
year before, my talk had been Wonder Woman: A Mythical Character
or State of Mind? which
I delivered wearing my Wonder Woman costume.
One of my more creative clients, Dan Maddux, Executive Director
of the American Payroll
Association, heard about my Wonder Woman performance and booked
me to do a similarpresentation at his next conference, called Are
You a Wonder Woman or a Superman in
Payroll?
For Year Fifteen, a few weeks after the Academy Awards, my
speech was called Oscars Cometo CBC: My Love Affair with the Movies
and Life Lessons From Movie Stars and Hollywood.
Starting with my youthful fascination with stars, then coming to
America and actually meeting
7/29/2019 How to Make Your Meetings Fun
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real movie stars, I went on to tell about the three valuable
lessons I had learned: A model for
business, the importance of costume, and the importance of
collaboration.
Many people were involved in the program and plenty of notice
was given about the theme, so
70 percent of the audience of 120 came in evening clothes. The
walls were decorated with movie
posters, Oscar-type music was played, and the tables with actual
strips of film curving aroundgold comedy and tragedy masks. There
was a red carpet up to an entrance, and, as the tuxedo-
clad recording engineer announced each arriving celebrity
(portrayed by a member), we told
inside jokes about them: Ladies and Gentlemen, our next
celebrity is so-and-so, the genius who
thought up the title for the film Titanic. An Oscar-type
lifetime achievement award was
presented to me, and my subsequent talk took the form of an
acceptance speech. I had made
notes of expressions and situations during the actual Oscar
telecast and put them into our script.
This meeting has gone down in history as one of the Continental
Breakfast Clubs most
successful events. (An English gentleman, part of my online
community and on vacation in the
U.S., traveled two hours to be there for my 7:00 AM
presentation. Hed read about my Wonder
Woman routine and wanted to see how I would top it.)
I sent Dan Maddux a tape of this event, and he eagerly hired me
to create a similar Oscars forthe American Payroll Association.
Heres a sample of the script we used.
ANNOUNCER: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the 7
1/2th Annual Academy
Awards! The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is buzzing with the sounds
of Hollywood. The crowd is
getting excited. Limos are three deep outside, and the
celebrities are beginning to arrive.
Our first celebrity, famed producer Gary Butler, nominated for
this years comedy sensation,
Absolutely Digging Payroll. And here comes three-time nominated
actress Maureen Reed, up
this year for Best Actress in her starring role as Rebecca in
Saving Sunny Brooks FarmThrough a New Payroll System
Installation.
First-time nominee Carol Franket, for her roll as Dolly the
Payroll Manager who clones herself
to accomplish and 80-hour work weed in this years sleeper, Nine
to One.
Susan Darring, famed B-movie actress and game show hostess, who
is making her comeback as
Payroll Hughies Momma in this years blockbuster, Its All in A
Days Pay.
And the winner is
WINNER: The Brits really cleaned up at the Oscars this year,
didnt they? And this afternoon weare going to honor yet another one
of merry old Englands superstars, Good Queen Fripp.
It has just been announced that Steven Spielberg is optioning
her bestselling book, Get WhatYou Want, and Julia Roberts has
tentatively accepted the role of Fripp. You can see that Fripp
is causing the same excitement in Hollywood that shes generated
here with the APA for the past
three years. It is my honor today to present Patricia Fripp with
the APA Oscar for Lifetime
Achievement. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for
Patricia Fripp!
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