Death by Meeting

Written as a novel and easy to read and relate to, Death by Meeting takes you on a journey from the classic dull meeting through iterations to a framework of efficient sessions in terms of time and reporting updates.

The end result is four recommended meetings.

The Daily Check-in

A 5-minute meeting for people to share what they're working on today.

The Weekly Tactical

45-90 minutes that kicks off with a lightning round where attendees get 60 seconds to share their priorities.

Next is a progress review where you share any key metrics. The idea is to get used to reviewing the data. 

Once the lightning round and progress review is complete (it should take about 5 minutes), the meeting focuses on the Real-time agenda. Rather than sending out the agenda before the meeting, the agenda is created during the meeting. The key here is that the agenda is created after hearing what everyone is focused on and reviewing your key metrics. Once those two critical bits of information have been shared, the agenda should be easy to create as problems and obstacles should have presented themselves. Focus on clearing obstacles and gaining alignment.

The Monthly Strategic

With the Weekly Tactical meeting taking care of issues, the Monthly strategic allows leaders to focus on larger topics without having to worry about squeezing in anything else. Each topic is given at least 2 hours to be presented and discussed. The key is planning enough time for proper discussions. In most businesses, meetings try to cover too much in too short a time. Calendars are littered with 1-hour meetings, which provide an unnecessary constraint to discussions.

The book also describes a Quarterly Off-site Review, which I won't cover here. The takeaways for me are to keep most meetings laser-focused but make sure you book out longer sessions to tackle the big things well.

Creativity Inc.

Creativity Inc. is the Pixar story and details how they run their meetings with stories from the development of some of their biggest hits.

My biggest takeaway was that building a safe space for people to be open to fearless feedback will enable you to work together more effectively, making difficult decisions easier to discuss.

I love to see meetings that are to the point and completely honest, where disagreements are encouraged while maintaining a safe environment.

How to Grow a Small Business

A great book for anyone growing a small business. There's a whole section on the five most effective meetings to run your business. 

The All-hands meeting

The Leadership Meeting

The Department standup

The Personal Priority Speed Check

Quarterly Performance Reviews 

Each meeting has a single A4 sheet which covers all the important information. They do a great job of keeping everyone aligned with the company goals as well as highlighting anything that needs to be done.

One of my favourites is the weekly all-hands. Each week you share the company's three top objectives, and one by one, each department shares with the team:

1. What they have done and are doing to achieve the company goals

2. How they added value to the customer last week

3. What they're doing this week to add value to the customer
   

Give them all a read, and let me know what you takeaway.