Improving the quality of your meetings can be difficult to do, I recently made an investment in a company named MeetingHero. Their software is designed around the premise that a well organized meeting will be an effective meeting. If there are agendas and notes that everyone in the meeting can participate in, the meeting will have more long lasting value. Personally, I love this!
The one thing that kills the usefulness of a meeting is getting together without a clear goal or outcome and walking away with loose action items or direction. Even informational meetings where the goal is that all attendees are now up to date on a set of projects are usually run poorly and no validation that the attendees actually paid attention or were brought up to speed occurs. Tools like MeetingHero are designed to address that problem.
Another premise that I love is the premise that meetings where the participants can move during the meeting will result in better meetings. Walking meetings are increasing in popularity. Here in Seattle we have a series of Geek walks (Geeks on a Trail) designed to address the effectiveness of walking meetings. Heck, I’d like to see this go even further and include biking meetings, running meetings, and so on.