Review: Death By Meeting

"Bad meetings exact a tool on the human beings who have to endure them."

In his book, Death by Meeting, Patrick Lencioni discusses issues that make most meetings ineffective and an approach to improve the effectiveness of meetings by clearly defining five different types or formats of meetings and how and when they can be used. Patrick explains that the typical ineffective recurring meeting can be considered "meeting stew" because the organizer tries to achieve too many objectives. These include, status updates, tactical discussions important to the tasks for the week, and strategic discussions important for long term planning.

The conflicting nature of these discussions requires that they are better separated into meetings at different intervals more appropriate to the time critical nature of the topic. The separation also gives the participants the opportunity to reset their mental mode for either the tactical or strategic discussion.

Patrick suggests daily stand-up status meetings(where appropriate to the organization), weekly tactical meetings, monthly strategic meetings, and quarterly or semi-annual off-site meetings. The tactical meetings begins with a lightning round where each participant discloses the top 3 tasks they are working on for the week. After this, an agenda is formed based on hot tactical issues for the week. Any more strategic issues are taken off of the table and placed on a list for discussion at a strategy meeting.

The agenda for monthly strategy meetings is formed by choosing 2-3 top issues on the strategy issues list for discussion. This should be done far enough in advance for the participants to prepare by researching related information. If a strategic issue arises that is too important to wait for the monthly strategic meeting, then an adhoc strategic meeting can be held. Emphasis is placed on maintaining a distinction between tactical(weekly) issues and strategic(longer term) issues.

Like many of Patrick's books, this is a quick and easy read, and the audio verion is enjoyable and can be listened to in a single long walk.

On Amazon On Kindle On Audible