Ever wonder how much money is spent holding each meeting?

I'll never forget the time I was a consultant, helping to reorganize the graphical document management system of a large company. We held a meeting to finalize a number of issues. One topic that came up was what colour a line representing a certain kind of object should be. The choice was between Red and Green. There were about 10 highly paid individuals there, all employees at this company. What I thought might take 60 seconds to decide ended up going back and forth for at least 30 minutes. It was simply ridiculous and I later started calculating how much money was being spent in salaries to make that one decision.

One of my new favourite blogs to read is the "Bits" section of the NY Times. It could aptly be described as "Technology meets Culture". An hilarious story today was about a little piece of software called "Meeting Miser" that allows one to calculate how much money is wasted ... errr "spent" at each meeting.