Instead of officially lowering its prices, Apple is in talks with retailers and banks to offer holiday deals all year round, according to people familiar with the plans. Those people say Apple is also asking some individual stores to more than quadruple sales targets, to 40 or 50 iPhones a week, and it plans to cut off retailers that consistently fail to hit the mark. Retail sales staff will be trained to teach customers how to use their devices, and Apple intends to overhaul in-store branding and product displays. Company executives are supposed to conduct daily conference calls with stores to gauge progress. Bloomberg Businessweek August 13 2018. Apple is losing India. Here’s the comeback plan. Photograph by Sunil Ghosh—Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Uh oh. “Conduct daily conference calls with stores to gauge progress.” My spidey senses go off seeing statements like this. Generally, in my experience, more meetings have often been a sign of ineffective communications and inadequate management rather than a solution to those same problems. More meetings usually are driven by the notion that things will improve if we sit on top of our people because, you know, it is our people who are the reason for why things are not going well.

However, there is still research that suggests people can be motivated by negative reinforcement:

Researchers at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France say a mean robot could motivate human employees to improve their cognitive performance, compared to supervision by a friendly robot or no robot supervision. New Scientist, August 15, 2018, Replacing Your Boss With a Cruel Robot Could Make You Concentrate More

Maybe if we have MeanMeetingBots™ run our meetings, adding meetings will actually increase productivity.

See Meeting Madness, Don’t Do It, and Lessons Learned From Microsoft Meeting Madness

Are you ensuring that your meetings are essential and add value and are not driven by the assumption that just pushing people to work harder will solve your project issues?