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| Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business | 
 enlarge | Author: Patrick M. Lencioni
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $12.33
You Save: $12.62 (51%)
New (62) Used (34) Collectible (2) from $11.68
Avg. Customer Rating:  82 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.3
ISBN: 0787968056
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.456
UPC: 723812499090
EAN: 9780787968052
Publication Date: March 4, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New Book! Ships quickly!
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Product Description
Casey McDaniel had never been so nervous in his life. In just ten minutes, The Meeting, as it would forever be known, would begin. Casey had every reason to believe that his performance over the next two hours would determine the fate of his career, his financial future, and the company he had built from scratch. “How could my life have unraveled so quickly?” he wondered. In his latest page-turning work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides readers with another powerful and thought-provoking book, this one centered around a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary. Casey McDaniel, the founder and CEO of Yip Software, is in the midst of a problem he created, but one he doesn’t know how to solve. And he doesn’t know where or who to turn to for advice. His staff can’t help him; they’re as dumbfounded as he is by their tortuous meetings. Then an unlikely advisor, Will Peterson, enters Casey’s world. When he proposes an unconventional, even radical, approach to solving the meeting problem, Casey is just desperate enough to listen. As in his other books, Lencioni provides a framework for his groundbreaking model, and makes it applicable to the real world. 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 77 more reviews...
Lessons for any organization that holds meetings January 3, 2009
In general I like the flow of Patrick Lencioni's books. He certainly has a creative streak which even gets the non-readers on leadership teams to actually get engaged in the topic at hand. This leadership fable did seem to drag on a bit more than the fables in his other books, particularly the Five Dysfunctions of a Team and the Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, hence the 4 stars versus 5.
The material covered in this book is neither new nor extraordinarily ground-breaking, rather it is a reminder to common sense. Having been involved in a number of organizations both for-profit business and non-profit organizations, I have sat through my share of "lifeless" meetings that seemingly drag on for hours accomplishing little. In the summary at the end of the book, Mr. Lencioni refers to Verne Harnish's book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm, which provides great information on strategic planning for both short-term and long-term goals, and structures for the daily meetings that Mr. Lencioni proposes in this book.
Throughout the story and in the summary, Mr. Lencioni compares the various meeting types to various forms of media such as "Headline News," sitcoms/ docudramas, movies, and mini-series, which just illustrates to me that the impact that the media has is not necessarily as "passive and irrelevant" as the author claims; the media has such a powerful impact that it informs how we view our world, so much so that we can even make comparisons from the media in our working lives. So how irrelevant is that? Yes, I know, it is not relevant in the way Mr. Lencioni alludes to in the book, in that the media choices we make do not directly impact what we will be working on and how we are "putting bread on the table," but doesn't media affect how we view the world around us?
No one likes conflicts, but it is inevitable November 27, 2008
The author tries to compare meetings with movies and to convince people that a meeting with conflicts is the most interesting one. His reasoning is that the reason people like to watch movies is conflict that a movie depicts.
In reality, no one like to see conflicts happen to themselves, though they are fascinated with conflicts happened to others with which they have no relationship.
However, that does not say that there is no way to deal with conflicts. Conflict is reality that exists in our daily lives. The constructive way to resolve conflicts is what the author describes in his another book, "Five dysfunctions of a team".
People have egos. Inevitable conflicts can easily invoke ego to a level that destroys a team. Why? Because any solution to a conflict will favor one side against another to some degree most of the time. When one side feels unfavored, he/she will become less interested in team work. However, it does not mean that there is no way to resolve such a problem. As a great leader, he/she shall find the values in people's arguments, and take such values in consideration for future discussion. Consequently, when one side, even the side that feels lose in the conflict, sees that his/her values in the arguments are recognized, the ego will be lessened. In fact, he/she will feel to be encouraged to have more valued arguments in the future.
Conflict is inevitable, and no one likes to see conflicts happening to him/herself. A great leader knows how to resolve this problem
 great read November 25, 2008
great read- easy read, strong message- made a huge impact on how I run meetings and the value my firm gets out of them. The week after I read it we had our best office meetinig ever. One worker later told me that it was just 'lucky' that we had a great meeting. Little did he know it was definately not luck.
Highlights Good and Bad Meeting Practices July 23, 2008
Patrick Lencioni highlights both good and bad meeting practices in "Death by Meeting." Meetings are a central component of the day-to-day operations at most modern businesses, and this book addresses the "practice" of meetings in a direct, head-on and meaningful fashion.
Some of my take-aways from this book were...meetings can be run poorly in many ways and the downstream effects of bad meetings are potentially significant and many.
Written in Lencioni's "fable and Model" style, I found the Model for good meetings to be, in large part, useful. Different teams/organizations will likely need to modify the Model as put forth in this book to be most effective, but I found the overall framework to be quite useful.
I recommend this book to anyone who spends some of their time in meetings...if nothing else, the book offers a refreshing and unique viewpoint of meetings in general.
Not a fiction, but management advice May 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is Patrick Lencioni's new book published in 2004, again a fiction and management book. I think this one, for the story, is better written than his previous books. The description of the characters and the scenes in the story are more interesting and with more depth.
The story is about a company, having been acquired, facing its new boss. It sensed a death threat by the man from headquarters. The white knight who came to the rescue was a temporary administrative assistant to the CEO. Seems to be a proper EO job and I therefore call him the EO.
The lethal aspect of meeting has two meanings in the book.
First, meetings are the most important activities of an organization. All major decisions are made, strategies are formed, actions are planned during meetings. If the meetings are not effective, they will lead to the death of the organization. This was exactly what happened in the story, that staff meetings were boring and ineffective and did not came up with clear direction for everybody.
Second, the impending meeting to be attended by the man from headquarters would mean life and death for the CEO. He would be assessed on whether the meeting was really so bad as to affect the company, and if so, that would mean death for his career.
The story proceeded to saving the meeting, from the insight of the EO. He drew inspiration from his academic studies on film and television and compared meetings with headline news, television series and movies.
Drama - for meetings to be interesting, there needs to be drama and conflict. The EO suggested the use of the skills of script writers and directors, and compared the conducting of a meeting to making a good movie. The first 10 minutes should be used to set up the drama and suspense, and to focus the attention and interest of members. Then the chairman would mine for conflict and expose all different views. Meetings are better than movies as there is real-time interaction instead of passive reception of information. The chairman would encourage constructive ideological conflicts and arguments before coming up with a decision.
Contextual structure - The other fatal mistake of meetings is the lack of contextual structure, i.e. a meeting stew of everything that smothers the important issues. Drawing analogy to television and movies, the EO suggested that there should be different types of meetings dedicated to specific purposes:
1. Daily check-in for 5 minutes similar to daily headline news which people watch briefly for snapshots of information.
2. Weekly tactical meeting for 1 hour same as sitcom and crime drama that people watch weekly for short stories.
3. Monthly strategic meeting which lasts for 2 hours as a movie for detailed discussion of a particular strategy or a complete story from beginning to end.
4. Quarterly off-site review for two days like mini-series which draws people's attention for a longer period of time.
A remark in the book I like is the myth of too many meetings. Interesting and effective meetings will not waste time but instead save time. Lencioni points out that very often sneaker time is not accounted for as consumption of resources. They are the time spent by managers outside the meetings just to find out what others are doing, clarifying actions, clearing doubts. The matrix of a large number of managers consumes a huge amount of sneaker time. If the meetings make effective and clear decisions with all stakeholders present, a lot of sneaker time will be saved.
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