I have enjoyed Patrick Lencioni’s books The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable… so I was intrigued by the title of his 2004 work: Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business. Like all of his books it is an easy read in an allegorical style.

In Death by Meeting Lencioni tackles the problem of ineffective meetings. He suggests that like movies or television shows, meetings should have drama that is born primarily out of healthy conflict. He also suggests that different types of meetings should be organized around different contexts in the same way that headline news, sitcoms, dramas, movies or mini-series all serve different contextual needs.

Although this is not a book about presentations or visuals per se, Lencioni offers lots of ideas about leading successful meetings. Death by Meeting is well worth the relatively short amount of time it takes to read.

Posted by Robert Befus in Techniques