Make sure that you have a good reason for calling or attending any meeting. Look upon each meeting as a busi- ness investment. Look upon a meeting as carrying a cost in managerial and staff time and wages. Take the combined hourly pay of the people in those meetings and realize that you need to get a return on your investment of this amount of money. If you have ten people in a room who earn an average of $50 per hour, then it is going to cost $500 out of the bank account of the company for a one-hour meeting. If someone wanted to spend $500 on a project and came to you for approval, you would want to know what the company would get from this expense. You would probably want to think about it for a while before you approved it. You might even demand more infor- mation and details before you are comfortable authorizing an expenditure of this size. Treat each meeting the same way. Avoid unnecessary meetings. Always ask if this meeting has to be held at all. Whenever a meeting is unnecessary, it is necessary not to have the meeting. If you personally don’t need to attend the meeting, then don’t attend. If you are organizing the meeting, ask yourself who is essential to the meeting, and invite only those people. Refrain from inviting people who don’t need to be there just to make them feel good or important.