Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

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He suggests "illustrat[ing] the dangers of making a bad decision, or highlight[ing] a competitive threat that is looming". But they also produce a subtle but enormous benefit by reducing unnecessarily repetitive motion and communication in the organization. And yet, meetings should be more interesting than movies because they have more inherent potential for passion and engagement than movies do. Lencioni’s ideas around leadership, teamwork and employee engagement have impacted organizations around the globe. The key to an effective Quarterly Offsite Review is to keep the destination simple, and the meeting structure to a minimum.

The fictional story goes through the process of how an organization reconfigured its meetings and became more productive and profitable.In the end, little is decided because the participants have a hard time figuring out whether they're supposed to be debating, voting, brainstorming, weighing in, or just listening. Counter to conventional wisdom about meetings, the agenda for a weekly tactical should not be set before the meeting, but only after the lightning round and regular reporting activities have taken place. The likelihood of six intelligent people coming to a sincere and complete agreement on a complex and important topic is very low. I listened to this story twice and found it exactly what I was looking for, as a recipe for creating compelling meetings with my staff of 16 managers.

The purpose of the meeting is to reflect on and discuss the state of the organization, not to provide executives with presentations and white papers.As the story unfolds, the CEO learns powerful and simplistic ways to make the meeting experience so much better! I will definitely try to implement these principles and structure in my teams as much as I'm able to. From the lack of leadership skills to inefficient meetings, Death By Meeting discusses the daily blunders we make without realizing it. As in the author's better-known The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, the exposition takes the form of a serviceably-written (but only just) novella that introduces the ideas, followed by a few chapters in essay form summarising the theory.

In any organization with thinking people, there will be differences of opinion on matters of strategy, organization, etc. The Executive Assistants are as important as their bosses to turn things around in the organization. I'm OK with that, since that is how I have come up with some of my best work, but it is an easy criticism for a business book. As I read, several meetings came to mind that I couldn't wait to escape from, but the concepts presented within the book to make meetings productive appeal to me.Will's fresh perspective becomes a catalyst for changing the meeting culture at Yip, as he compares the lackluster boardroom interactions to disappointing and poorly scripted television dramas. Not only is the story entertaining, but it has practical advice, examples, and a proven meeting structure that will help any organization.