Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli is another title that was originally published by Seth Godin’s Domino Project. I have had it on my Kindle bookshelf for a while. Finally got to it this week. It had some interesting takeaways:
- When you have a decision to make, you must make the decision first, before you can call a meeting. Get the input you need to make the decision through one-on-one conversations, but until you make the decision, don’t call a meeting.
- You should only call a meeting to accomplish one of two things. If there is significant disagreement about the decision, use a meeting to resolve the conflict to come to the best decision. If there is coordination with multiple people or teams, use a meeting to get everyone aligned and lock down the plan.
- Only people who need to be involved to resolve a disagreement about a decision or people who will be involved in implementing a decision should be invited to the meeting.
- Everyone needs to come to a meeting prepared. There should be a clear objective, agenda, and background reading circulated well before and everyone who is going to attend MUST read it before the meeting.
- Meetings should NEVER be informational. There are much better ways to provide people information (briefing docs, videos, audios) to get people information than calling a meeting.
The original Domino edition is no longer available, so I included the link to the current edition available on Amazon.
Read This Before Our Next Meeting
by Al Pittampalli
Traditional meetings are a weapon of mass interruption. Long live the Modern Meeting!
The average American office worker spends eleven hours in meetings every week. Yet all that time sitting around a conference table hasn’t made us more productive. If anything, meetings have made work worse.
Traditional meetings reduce efficiency, kill urgency, and breed compromise and complacency. Worst of all, our dysfunctional meeting culture changes how we focus, what we focus on, and what decisions we make.
But there is a solution, a way to have fewer, shorter, more purposeful meetings. It’s called the Modern Meeting Standard. By following its eight simple but radical principles you may never have to attend a useless meeting again.
Read This Before Our Next Meeting is the call to action you (and your boss) need.
Published September 15, 2015
69 pages (print)