DEATH by Meeting
Patrick Lencioni
“Death by Meeting” is nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams, and create environments of engagement and passion.
A trusted business friend gave this book to me and I read it across two days. I had not been so excited by a book in a long time! I loved it!
The cover, as you can see, is a business guy head desking on top of a meeting agenda. I figured I would just skim over it and then read the other bookies waiting for me to read. A trusted business friend recommended it to me – otherwise I wouldn’t have picked it up on my own. Once I had it, I thought I might get more insights into meetings.
Most of the book is a fictional story about a leadership team and how they are currently running their meetings. You get suckered in (invested) in how they improve their meetings. Given that it has this story you see real life examples of how it can be used and not just the plain theory. The characters give some of the reader’s thoughts back at them like ‘Why do we need more meetings? or ‘Really? You want me to do this in a meeting?’ where it is answered in the story as a group and the characters chatting about it.
Unlike the other business books where they try to cram in a bunch of theories and just hop about in meaningless or difficult to follow manner the story creates a framework. I would have preferred a little more of the ‘Fast Forward’ (non-fiction) at the end with the theories. This could have included more examples with the team doing the good meetings, the different types of good meetings. It was really interesting and enjoyable. This really has one meeting theory that can be summarized on a single page, so it’s not a reread of the whole book, just a revisit of the summarized theory at the back if need be.
Perhaps the most gleaming commendation for this book is that I stayed up late, and read this over two days. I don’t think I’ve ever been so absorbed! Also, I don’t normally like fiction, and I could hardly believe I was reading a fictional story and loving it so much.