Pros: Easy to read and digest. Maybe workable ideas.
Cons: Comes across like a project proposal for consulting work.
The Bottom Line: Managers interested in improving the yield from meetings might want to give some of these ideas a try. Good reading for a short flight.
dhandforth's Full Review: Patrick Lencioni - Death by Meeting: A Leadership ...
The Challenge
Every senior manager and executive has been through this: Once a week or month or quarter, there is a meeting on your calendar that you want to avoid. Not because it necessarily has anything to do with you, but because it is so boring.
In the company parlance, it might be one of those “update meetings” where otherwise sane and pleasant executives and managers sit around for two or three hours to drone on about their departments, while assiduously not listening to anyone else---in case it extends the length of the meeting. Everyone quietly agrees the meetings are a waste of time since nothing much ever happens during or after the meeting. But no one wants to call them off.
Some hang on to these meetings because they believe that they are a necessary evil. It is part of what executives and manager “do”. At least, they think, meetings are an efficient way to communicate with each other.
The more humane organizations may try to limit the damage by restricting the meeting to a set time limit with strict agendas. That way, at least the pain can be put into a box. More enlightened organizations even try to give presentation coaching to the managers, and try to move “bigger” topics offsite to a quarterly or annual weekend retreat.
But the meetings are still boring. The weekend retreats just become two-day versions of boredom.
Sound familiar?
So if meetings are so dreadful, why does every organization have them? Why are they important enough to schedule regularly? Why do people prepare for them with agendas, presentations, and time clocks? What is the point of these corporate exercises in ennui?
The answer, of course, is that meetings are still the most effective way for key personnel within an organization to talk to each other. Done right, meetings energize the participants. They resolve uncertainty, set directions, keep the team informed on the team member’s work loads, and provides a forum for debate. Done right, it can be the most powerful competitive tool in the corporate arsenal.
Unfortunately almost nobody does it right.
The problem, according to management consultant Patrick Lencioni, is that there are just too few meetings, and the ones we have are too short!
In Death By Meeting, Lencioni takes the reader through another Leadership Fable that first shows us the problem, then takes us through some intellectual drama, before giving the reader one way to do it right.
Leadership Fables
The Leadership Fable, for non-business readers, is a literary device used to teach business models to managers. It tells (what are essentially) case histories through the eyes of “characters”, and presents business problems and their possible solutions like stories. There is typically a sympathetic main character beset with seemingly implacable business problems in a business environment. A guru, sometimes real and sometimes magical, appears to guide the character through the business problem. By following the guru’s advice, the character fixes the problem, saves the day, and makes lots of money. The idea is that by recasting difficult business problems as stories, readers will not only be able to digest the problem and solution more quickly, but also more easily analogise the situation with their own circumstances.
The Leadership Fable was made popular by books such as Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s 1981 classic The One Minute Manager, Eliyahu Goldratt’s 1992 guide The Goal, and more recently, another Blanchard/Johnson bestseller Who Moved My Cheese?. Lencioni himself scored a best selling fable with his first book, 1998’s The Five Temptations of a CEO (review pending).
The Book
This time, in Death by Meeting Lencioni takes us through the tribulations of Casey McDaniel, CEO of the fictional YAP! Software Company. Casey’s company sells software to golf enthusiasts that improve their game. In a bid to grow the company, Casey agreed to merge with a larger software company: Playsoft. The VP at Playsoft in charge of Casey’s merged division, J.T. Harrison, attends two of Casey’s meetings and is so underwhelmed by what he sees that he threatens in an email that: “I am having doubts about your ability to run your division”. And gives Casey a dead line to shape up or ship out.
Fortuitously for Casey, he happens to take on a new personal assistant (or PA) Will Petersen. Will happened to have college level theatre training, and as if to prove that a liberal arts education is not an impediment to contributing at a high level in a business organization, Wills sets out to redesign and direct all of the meetings at Yap! Using a highly unconventional, even radical, approach to solving the meeting problem, Will creates a new framework for conducting meetings.
According to the new model, meetings need to be like movies. They need drama and they need contextual structure. The leader needs to “mine” for conflicts amongst his/her team, and they need to set up meetings for specific purposes.
By “mining” for conflict, a leader will bring all of the resistance and doubt about a decision onto the table. A leader will ultimately have to make a decision, but with all possible issues aired in advance, the idea is that a high performance team will “buy in” to the decision of a good leader. Meetings should be given enough time so that the debate can really get going.
As for meeting structures, Lencioni/Will proposes breaking meetings into four categories: The Daily Check In, The Weekly Tactical, The Monthly Strategic, and The Quarterly Off Site Review. Each meeting should have its own dynamic, agenda, purpose, and resolution. By breaking the meeting into four pieces, the model embeds expectations into the meetings and creates an environment where those expectations will most likely be met.
Incidentally, Will ends up saving his boss in the best tradition of the self sacrificing PA.
As with Lencioni’s three previous books, this 260 page book is divided into two parts. Part I is the fable, taking up around 220 pages. Part II gives the executive summary of the model for the serious reader.
The Author
Patrick Lencioni is a San Francisco Bay Area based management consultant formerly with Bain & Company and Oracle Corporation. He wrote his first book while his was vice president of organizational development at Sybase. He now heads his own management consulting firm, The Table Group. He has written three previous Leadership Fables: The Five Temptations of a CEO, The Four Obsessions of and Extraordinary Executive, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. His first book remains his best and landmark work.
The Critique
The book is easy to read. Lencioni’s writing is clear and to the point. He keeps the pages turning by keeping the chapters short (sometimes only one or two paragraphs), and then liberally using dramatic foreshadowing at the end of every chapter to telegraph what to expect out of the next chapter. All the action takes place in the space of about half a dozen meetings with a number of “off stage” meetings thrown in to illustrate the model working. It is possible to read the whole thing in under two hours.
This is not literature. In fact, it is business advice thinly dressed up as fiction. The characters don’t have much character. And the suspense is not really suspenseful. What happens in the story is not even really believable. For example, name one CEO who would turn over his senior meetings to a temp PA to run.
But this is a fable. The book's main purpose is to highlight corporate realities. It does not to provide the magic bullet that will suddenly create effective meetings. In fact, a hidden message of the book might be that the key to changing the organization is there needs to be an outside agent to effect change. Implementation is the key, and consultants can help.
In the end, what keeps the reader riveted is the “puzzle”. Lencioni sets up the problems beautifully. Many situations are familiar in the “real world” to the majority of the readers. Readers keep reading because they want to see how the problems are solved. This is the allure of the Leadership Fable. Readers without a lot of time and left over brain power can be taught deep concepts in an entertaining manner.
Here, the message is clear: meetings should be interactive, not passive, with the leader drawing out conflict. And the meetings need to be structured so that issues of immediate importance should be discussed in "weekly tactical" meetings, and issues of strategic importance should be addressed in a different, say, "monthly strategic" meeting.
Substantively, the advice in this book is for more applicable to an organizational “tune up” rather than a “fix it” like in his previous works. This is a book about how improving a form (the meeting) will also improve the function (that of making money).
Although managers will find this advice worthwhile, they could learn just as much if they skipped the gimmicky fable and just read the last 40 pages of plain speaking expository prose.
According to Lencioni, a bad meeting won’t kill the organization, but it does create a gap between a company’s potential and actual performance. He points to Microsoft as a company that runs effective meetings and so gets full performance from its senior team. Of course, he leaves out the part about how having a monopoly helps even more.
The part I liked best about the book was his concept that instilling conflict into meetings will liven up corporate communications. Providing no one takes it personally (not a given in any organization I’ve ever worked in), this can really give insight into what makes the business model work. I’m all in favor of a lot more open discussion of the issues. I’m just not sure, short of hiring the consultants, how to make it work and keep it working without bruising egos.
I’ve read every one of Lencioni’s books and count myself as a “fan” of his advice. He has a way of identifying the right problems that tend to annoy executives. He puts the problems down in the right way, and he has “pat” solutions to the problems that read like they could work.
But applying his pat solutions to the messy real world can get, well, a little messy. That’s why you would need to hire a consultant to help out. While his first book (and arguably his second) were almost spiritual works worthy of his status as executive coach, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that his last book The Five Dysfunctions of a Teamand this book are just thinly disguised project proposals. They could just as easily have been used in presentations to pitch for work in a Fortune 500 Corporation.
The Bottom Line
Death By Meeting provides leaders with an idea of how to reduce the frustration generated by bad meetings. To any leader looking for ways to eliminate waste and improve productivity (and which leader isn’t?), this is a pretty good presentation and quite reasonably priced. If it works, the team will re-engage with passion.
Just be ready with the check book when you call for the consultant.
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