Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Death by Meeting is another one of Patrick Lencioni’s fable-style business books. It basically describes how to make meetings efficient and valuable rather than boring and tedious.

Most people in “executive roles” (whether the traditional sense or the sense of people that “execute” and make things happen) say “I love my job, but I hate going to meetings”. Lencioni points out that this is like a professional athlete saying, “I love my job, but I hate playing in games.”

Basically people who lead and manage don’t really do anything tangible; meetings are pretty much it. So it’s critical that this time is spent wisely and efficiently.

Of course, lots of people (especially at the low levels of an organization) fall into the fallacy that if they are in meetings all the time they are accomplishing things. These are the people that show you they are triple-booked all day from 8 am to 7 pm and expect you to be impressed. In reality, if you need that many meetings you’re most likely not effective and hurting your team. If each meeting isn’t achieving a tangible result, it’s a waste.

The fable in this book is mostly useless, as it blends the fable with the student/teacher style. To make the book longer, the teacher is learning as he teaches, so we get some unnecessary iterations.

There are just a few simple points in the book and I didn’t learn anything new:

• Meetings need to have “drama” and “conflict”. In reality this means you need to have engaging back and forth discussion. This is rarer nowadays because important decisions are made in private discussions before the meeting occurs. In my work, I will almost always have consensus on the bulk of a controversial topic going into the meeting, and then use that time to discuss some of the details. Ideally, I could do it all in the meeting, but today’s corporate culture expects meetings to be tedious so people are not expecting to have detailed discussions and are engrossed in reading their email.

• Meetings need contextual structure. In addition to having agendas, you need to have different types of meetings for the issues at hand. Lencioni recommends the following: Daily Check-in (five minutes), Weekly tactical (quick round the room, metrics/progress update, real-time agenda based on the preceding items), Monthly Strategic (single topic, analyze, debate, decision making), Off-site Review (Strategy Review, Team Review, Personnel Review, Competitive Review). Obviously, this needs to be modified depending the type of team you’re leading.

• Good meetings (with clarity, closure, and buy-in) will reduce the amount of running around, emails, and general confusion you need to deal with. If the information is communicated clearly in the first place, it saves a lot of time down the road.

I have the same recommendation for this as The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: “The book is a very quick read (under an hour), so in that sense it’s probably worth reading. If you take a few notes as you read, there’s no need to re-read it.”