Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book was recommended by a trusted colleague and after she told me how much it changed her outlook and ultimately reality about meeting effectiveness, I had to read it. Lencioni's storytelling style is very engaging, actually riveting. I felt as passionate about finishing this book as I would a well-written fiction novel. The technique really drives his message home by bringing you in emotionally. Anyone in an office can relate to the characters and content in the book.

What you end up with is some very tangible advice and guidance on having better meetings, and it all makes a lot of sense. It's not easy to put all of the things into place, but it's also not easy to sit through a lifetime of bad meetings either. So I'm excited to integrate elements of this book into my life.

Gave me a whole new paradigm by which to think about meetings... very insightful....another ball hit out of the park by Lencioni
I highly recommend this book to anyone who lives his work a day life in meetings....

This is one in a series of "leadership fables" in which Patrick Lencioni shares his thoughts about the contemporary business world. His characters are fictitious human beings rather than anthropomorphic animals, such as a tortoise that wins a race against a hare or pigs that lead a revolution to overthrow a tyrant and seize control of his farm.

In this instance, Lencioni focuses on probably the single greatest waste of organizational resources: meetings. Although they are "the closet thing to an operating room, a playing field, or a stage that we have...most of us hate them. We complain about, try to avoid, and long for the end of meetings, even when we're running the darn things! How pathetic is it that we have come to accept that the activity most central to the running of our organizations is inherently painful and unproductive?" Nonetheless, in most organizations, meetings comprise the single greatest cause of waste of resources and, yes, of opportunities as well.

Briefly, here's the fictitious situation. Lencioni introduces Casey McDaniel, generally viewed as "an extraordinary man - but just an ordinary CEO" of Yip Software, a designer and manufacturer of sports-related video games company he founded. What is perhaps most significant about Casey is the fact that conducts lethargic, unfocused, and passionless staff meetings that his colleagues understandably dread, as does he. For reasons best revealed within the narrative, he sells his company to Playsoft, the second-largest manufacturer of video games. Enter J.T. Harrison who serves as a liaison between Yip and Software. Almost immediately, Casey's inadequacies as a CEO and, especially, the consequences of the executive staff meetings he conducts become obvious to Harrison who becomes increasingly concerned about Yip's underperformance. Casey's career and the fate of his company are in jeopardy when Casey hires Will Petersen to be his temporary administrative assistant while his permanent administrative assistant is on maternity leave.

What then happens - and does not happen -- throughout the ensuing weeks enables Lencioni to dramatize the importance of scheduling, preparing for, conducting, and then following through on meetings that are never boring nor ineffective. Hence the great emphasis Lencioni places on having different kinds of meetings (e.g. daily check-in, weekly tactical, monthly or as-needed ad hoc strategic, and quarterly off-site), each of which has a different context, purpose, structure, and timeframe. Obviously, some meetings will generate more conflict, excitement, drama, etc. than will others. Over the years, many (if not most) of the staff meetings I have participated in (including those I conducted) wasted time on discussion of what to discuss rather than on making decisions about what to do.

At least 8-10 years ago, Lencioni apparently made a conscious decision to address especially important business issues by creating a human context for each rather than merely offering answers to questions or prescribing solutions to problems. To me, this is one of the greatest benefits of a business narrative, in this instance of a leadership fable: Creating a series of real-world situations (albeit portrayed fictitiously) that readers can identify with emotionally as well as rationally. He is a brilliant business thinker but he also possesses the skills of a master raconteur as he introduces a cast of characters, develops conflicts between and among them, and then allows "rising action" to build to a climax that is also best revealed within the narrative. Unexpected plot developments engage the reader even more.

Of special interest to me is Will's role in this business fable. He serves as an especially effective means by which Lencioni articulates his insights and suggestions. Eventually, in ways and to an extent also best revealed within the narrative, Will has a profound impact on Casey's leadership style as well as on Yip Software's fate. Although Casey and his colleagues as well as J.T. Harrison are fictitious characters, each is credible as a human being rather merely functioning as a literary device. Their values, concerns, personalities, anxieties, and behavior will be very familiar to anyone who has been involved in non-productive group discussions.

As is Lencioni's custom in each of the other volumes in the series of "leadership fables," he also includes (after the Fable) a "Model" section, consisting of supplementary material (Pages 221-254) whose value-added benefits will help his reader to make effective application of the lessons learned from the experiences shared by Casey and his colleagues at Yip Software. Lencioni leaves no doubt that there are direct correlations between enjoyable as well as productive meetings and effective leadership and management to establish and then sustain a "healthy"organization.

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Patrick Lencioni's other "leadership fables" as well as Michael Ray's The Highest Goal, David Maister's Practice What You Preach, Bill George's Authentic Leadership and his more recently published True North, James O'Toole's Creating the Good Life, and Michael Maccoby's Narcissistic Leaders.

I had asked my manager about borrowing his copy of the book and he said it wasn't that great, so when I was ordering some other books I inculded it in my order and that was a good move, the book helped me figure out some of the things that we should be doing and I am thinking my manager didn't want me to see that the way we are having meetings isn't how Lencioni shows how things should be done.

The title is provocative and will probably sell books. The parable of a software game firm in Monterey struggling with ineffective meetings makes for a reasonably readable, well-scripted (except for "our data is inconclusive." p. 184) and intriguing story. "Death" has the air of "Disclosure" without the sex, as Yip Software allows itself to be taken over (cashing in -- a decision that probably warrants more attention than do the other matters in the book) and then scrutinized by a bigger firm. There is a late twist in the seemingly diabolic machinations of the larger firm and the catalyst to the correction in team decision making is imbued with a needless obsessive-compulsive, Tourette-like malady that allows him to have a psychological excuse -- when he is off his meds - to speak up at the meetings.

The parable reads well enough and early on reminded me of John Cleese's marvelous training film, "Meetings, bloody meetings." The original video was so good when it was made almost thirty years ago that Video Arts updated it -- with almost the exact same script and several of the same actors-- ten years ago. "Death" is more current. But Cleese in both versions got it right, better, and funnier than Lencioni. He viewed team meetings as akin to a court proceeding or a trial. The analogy worked.

Effective meetings need critical thinking, not groupthink. The Senate report on the CIA is only the most recent example of no one taking a critical stance as partial information and unreliable data accumulate. But conflict does not seem to be the appropriate remedy for premature or inappropriate consensus. Lencioni is right: Real consensus is difficult if not impossible. But constructive critical thinking is better than conflict (or obsessives off their meds) to make a meeting effective and "interesting". Getting people to feel passionate about their work and their firm is important yet passion does not come from interesting meetings, picnics or stock vesting plans. The passion needs to come from somewhere else.

Cleese's film emphasizes the need to prepare and inform in a way that Lencioni apparently rejects for weekly "tactical" meetings: No agenda, says Lencioni. Lencioni uses an imaginative Holloywood metaphor to illustrate different types of meetings -- there are sitcoms, movies and miniseries parallels for meetings -- but this doesn't really work out for me in the end. The parable comes to an abrupt end and then Lencioni moves to a more formal, structured teaching style and my interest that had been waning disappeared.

I prefer "Death by chocolate" myself.

I found this book very inspiring. The fable style really makes reading enjoyable. Simple example in daily life.

Continuing the current hot trend of couching business counsel in fables, author Patrick Lencioni takes on the ogre of the deadly dull meeting and through story and advice, wrestles it to the ground. The book is in large part about boring meetings and the author manages to reproduce their tone exactly. The protagonists are the boss, Casey, and an employee named Will who eventually loses his temper in the face of one more stifling, useless meeting. The author plants lessons about meetings throughout the story, revealed by the characters' experiences. However, after the fable comes an undiluted section of advice: about 40 pages of straightforward, expository prose about how to have more effective, engaging meetings. If you want useful workday advice and prefer to save fairytales - even those with built-in lessons - for bedtime, start there. We welcome this solid guidance on how to make meetings work better.

Lencioni has done it again. He truly has a gift to tell stories and this fable captures your attention from beginning to end. Executives seem to be comfortable with meetings that lack luster, context and clarity -- no wonder smart people make horrible decisions at times. When something is so wildly broken, the only way to fix it is a whole new approach - which Lencioni provides in his meetings model outlined in the second part of the book. Like his previous book, this one will be a best-seller for a long, long time (I did just notice it appeared on the BusinessWeek Best-seller list already).

for a business management book, this one is pretty good. the fable is fairly interesting and the book is a fairly quick read.

what makes this a 4 star book though is the concept of instilling conflict into meetings. too many executives feel the team concept requires acquiescence by the members. stay in your silo and nod approval. the importance of conflict not only adds interest to meetings, it creates open discussion and the exchange of different ideas and perspectives. it fosters the creative thought process. it challenges all members to problem solve. it requires the leader to support his position and suffer the pangs of self doubt. in the end you end up with a better decision--not a unanimous one.

i am a believer that if you surround yourself with people who will only tell you what you want to hear, you don't need them. you need people who will challenge you to test your ideas and create different ones. if handled properly, your meetings won't just be more interesting, your decisions will be better!

that's the message of this book.

His previous book, "Five Disfunctions..." is by far the best work Lencioni has written to date, so "Death By Meeting" had quite a challenge to match when it came out. Although it falls a little short, still it accomplishes a task that cannot be diminished: it shows executives (and managers at large, I'd argue) how to make meetings more effective for once, and (are you ready for this?) he advocates for more, not less, meetings, in order to enhance the performance of companies and positively impact the lives of those who work in them.

The book, like his previous ones, is cleverly structured in two large parts: The Fable and The Model. The first part lays out a sort of novel, where the characters could pretty much be you and me, taking part in management meetings in our own companies, and tells the story of how implementing his methodology (brought about by a "consultant in disguise", impersonated by the CEO's personal assistant) helped put the company's steering team out of its meeting "misery", by turning their meetings into a satisfactory and productive experience that they started looking forward to from then on.

The second part summarizes the methodology presented in The Fable, in a more general context, by introducing the four types of meeting he advocates:
-Daily Check-In
-Weekly Tactical
-Monthly Strategic (or Ad Hoc Strategic)
-Quarterly Off-site Review

Even if you think you are effective at managing your meetings, I highly recommend that you give "Death By Meeting" a read. It won't take more than 2 hours of your time, and it will provide you and your team with benefits to reap for life. Disregard at your own managerial risk!