Everyone hates meetings, and yet attending meetings is probably the most decisive and influential activity in any worker’s life. Meetings are where impressions are made, where ideas are proposed, where training occurs, and where groups come to form. If your meetings suck, then the consequences are tragic.

Death by Meeting is another brilliant product of the mind of Patrick Lencioni. In this work, Lencioni covers the following concepts:

• Conflict is what makes meetings interesting and should be encouraged
• Too many meetings is not the problem - bad meetings are the problem
• What sorts of meetings to hold and how to divide up your concept
• How about using meetings to actually solve problems instead of wasting time reading what could have been sent in email.

Lencioni covers his material in a narrative parable - a ficitional story that he has invented to tell the story of a company in trouble specifically because of their meetings and what they did to overcome and reinvent the way they hold them.

The story is interesting and entertaining. Lencioni is a not a bad writer of fiction. He makes his points at the moment when the reader’s brain begins screaming, “How are they going to fix this?” That skill makes him a very effective writer who understands his audience.

This book is not a first-read for non-managers. Death By Meeting is basically a recipe for how to structure daily, weekly and monthly meetings to be more effective. Those who do not plan and host their own team’s meetings may find what they learn in the book very frustrating as they will likely see the wisdom of what Lencioni preaches but find themselves unable to experience it.

This is a must-read for any manager who currently hosts a weekly staff meeting which contains a “cascade” of directives from on-high which could just as well have been a single text message with bullets. Do your meetings suck? Are your employees in physical pain while attending them but not telling you?

It is likely that the answer from them would be “Yes!” if they were not afraid of harming their standing in your eyes. Read the book, and heed the lesson. It is very unlikely you are a brilliant exception who is the master of the productive staff meeting.

Grab a copy of Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business from Amazon.com today! It is a quick read and a very good book.