Book SummaryDeath by Meeting, by Patrick M. Lencioni

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Death by Meeting

Meetings are the lifeblood of an organization—they are central to its success but are also often seemingly useless and too long. This presents a paradox—how can you make meetings more productive when your staff views them as pointless? The answer is to make meetings better. Death By Meeting provides a roadmap to do so.

Author Patrick Lencioni illustrates how to make meetings more engaging and productive through the parable of Casey, a golf pro turned software developer who runs a sports gaming company called Yip Software. He’s a smart guy and generally a good boss, but he runs boring, unfocused meetings that deplete team morale. When he sells his company to become a subsidiary of a larger gaming company called Playsoft, a Playsoft executive named J.T. begins to attend Casey’s meetings and is shocked by the team’s lack of passion and urgency. It’s like they’re talking about a case study in business school rather than the future of their own company.

J.T. communicates to Casey that his job is at risk if he can’t focus his meetings better. Fearing for his livelihood, Casey huddles with his precocious assistant Will and devises a strategy to have more meetings and to fill them with movie-like drama. Just like in the movies, meetings have to have a hook—a good beginning that leaves participants willing to digest necessary plot exposition that might be a little slower. Consider discussing a budget: It sounds boring. But if you set it up correctly—by explaining the stakes in the line items and the competitors breathing down the company’s neck—people will be more willing to engage.

When J.T. returns to Yip to attend another meeting, he’s impressed by the transformation. Not only does Casey keep his job, but he makes his company more efficient and raises morale.

Casey isn’t the only executive who struggles to run productive meetings and engage his team. There are three significant issues with most meetings: A lack of drama, a lack of structure, and a lack of frequency.

Problem #1: No Drama

Meetings are tedious. Given that most people sitting through meetings have other work that they could be doing, this is a huge issue, and it makes most employees resent meetings as a waste of their time. Meetings are tedious because there is no drama or tension within most meetings. In fact, most meeting leaders skirt tension if it exists.

Solutions

To solve this problem, actively look for disagreement or drama. This keeps meeting participants engaged and leads to important strategic discussions. If two people have a disagreement, backed up by data, it’s helpful for everyone to hear it, because it engages them and helps them form their own opinions about the company’s decisions.

Think about a great screenplay. Screenwriters develop conflict and resolution over two hours. There are different kinds of conflict—from man versus a system in a movie like A Few Good Men to man versus nature, an unseen enemy, and himself in Apocalypse Now. Like movies, meetings often last two hours, but they lack everything that makes movies enjoyable, when in fact, meetings should be more fun than watching a movie.

• You can interrupt the action at a meeting. If someone has a point that you disagree with, you can engage them in discussion.
• Meetings are more relevant to our daily lives. They determine, in part, what we’ll be working on, how happy we are at work, how productive our work environment is, how much money we make, and how long our hours are.

Find a Hook

In every good movie, conflict starts within the first ten minutes. This is called the “hook”—it’s what draws people into the movie and makes them want to keep watching. A good meeting works the same way. A hook can take many forms, but it should explain the stakes. As the meeting leader, explain that the company is under threat, or that it’s struggling to make a dent in a new market, or that a bad decision could lead to these problems. Or, if you don’t want to start on a negative note, explain how a good decision could make life better for employees, clients, or the world.

Employees need a reason to care. Finding a hook is easy, because as we’ve illustrated, meetings do matter. They decide the direction of a company.

Find Conflict

After you’ve explained the stakes, look for disagreement. If there’s a group of reasonably smart people discussing an issue that they all care about (because of the hook), they’ll disagree on at least a small part of it. If you hear disagreement or even see on someone’s face that they’re...

Death by Meeting Summary The Model | How to Have Productive Meetings

Meetings are the lifeblood of an organization—they are central to its success but are also often seemingly useless and too long. This presents a paradox—how should companies move forward with critical meetings that the staff see as pointless? The answer is to make meetings better. Death By Meeting provides a roadmap to do so and a parable that explains exactly why this task is so important.

Death By Meeting is organized into two sections. The first part of the book tells the story of a bad boss, his employees, and how he operates both among them and in the larger world of business. The story includes lessons about managing people and conducting meetings. The second part of the book is a condensed list of prescriptions for management success.

(Shortform note: We’ve flipped the book’s two-part structure to put the principles before the parable.)

There are three significant issues with most meetings: A lack of drama, a lack of structure, and a lack of frequency.

Problem #1: No Drama

Meetings are tedious. Given that most people sitting through meetings have other work that they could be doing, this is a huge issue, and it makes most employees resent meetings as a...

Shortform Exercise: Create Your Own Agenda

This exercise will help you apply these principles to your own meetings.

Think about your workplace. What would the contents of a good check-in (quick 5-minute) meeting be?

Death by Meeting Summary The Parable | Part 1: Yip Launches

The following parable shows how essential following the principles of running a good meeting is. At the end of each section, we’ll briefly review lessons learned.

Casey has a lovely wife and kids, he’s a good neighbor, and he’s a regular churchgoer. He’s an easy person to respect, and his employees like him as a person—they just don’t like him as a boss.

Casey grew up caddying and playing at a golf course near his home in Monterey, California. He loved the game, and he went to college on a golf scholarship, where he continued to excel at golf. He also studied engineering and computer science.

After college, he continued pursuing his dream to make the PGA tour, earning money playing pro golf. But, as he was finally starting to break through in big tournaments, he got the yips—everything was fine with him physically, but psychologically, he stopped being able to put.

His dreams of a pro golf career over, Casey went home to Monterey and married, bought a small house with his savings, and decided to play to his strengths and launch a realistic golf video game. This combined his interest in...

Death by Meeting Summary Part 2: Dominos Start to Fall

The problems became even clearer when Yip hired a new VP of Human Resources. She began by surveying the entire company on job performance, morale, and a host of other topics, and she found that morale in particular was low. She presented this information to executives at Yip, who became worried. They had known the issue was there, but they could ignore it as long as they didn’t have data to back it up. Now, they no longer had that luxury, and everyone started talking about the problem.

The team started to question this and much of the rest of the way the company functioned. For example, partly because he was raising a family, Casey made the decision not to build violent, fantasy games aimed at kids. He stuck to sports, even though the market for these other games was growing much more quickly than the market for sports games.

The head of product development thought that they should focus more on the quality of their existing products than add new features. The VP of sales asked if they could reconsider their decision to stick with sports games, especially given that fantasy games had the biggest growth market. Casey said that people needed a new challenge to rally around....

Shortform Exercise: Find Meeting-Based Solutions

Consider how often you’re annoyed by something happening in your workplace. This exercise will help you articulate why some activities annoy you.

Reflect on your typical meetings at work. How do they function?

Death by Meeting Summary Parts 3-4: Increased Scrutiny and Solutions

When Will came into the office, it was clear immediately that he had a magnetic personality. He was gregarious but also seemed kind and curious about the job. Casey knew right away that he would hire him.

Will felt comfortable enough in the interview, especially given that he was overqualified for the position, to ask about Playsoft and the scrutiny that Yip was under. Casey immediately understood that Will’s qualifications and his curiosity would be an asset during a difficult time for the company. So Casey told Will that he could help out with tasks and strategy that aren’t usually part of an administrative assistant’s job.

Unfortunately, Will was not entirely forthcoming about his background. As a child, Will had often blurted out inappropriate and rude remarks to people. This made it difficult for his teachers to like him and got him into scuffles with other kids frequently. He was diagnosed in high school as having a mild case of OCD and Tourette’s Syndrome. He started taking medication and seeing a therapist and his symptoms went away quickly.

However, after leaving grad school, Will decided to stop taking his medication. And his old symptoms came back.

...

Death by Meeting Summary Part 5: Success

The team in the room accepted the finer points of each meeting and mostly liked the ideas. But while presenting, Will let slip that J.T. and Wade would be attending a meeting to assess Casey’s performance, and that Casey’s job was on the line. The team was up in arms about the possibility of Casey getting fired over meeting performance, but Casey assured the team that they needed to fix the meetings not only for his own job security, but also for the functioning of the company.

Will was feeling nervous, so he called an administrative assistant he knew in Chicago to try and get some more intel on J.T. She told him that she couldn’t say too much, but when Playsoft acquired her subsidiary company, she and her boss both almost quit after J.T. came around to the company frequently.

Will and Casey started to prepare for the fast-approaching meeting. First, they decided that they would do a strategic meeting, as this would best show J.T. the enthusiasm that the team had developed for their new meeting strategy. They wanted to bring up a couple of important issues and discuss them well in earshot of J.T. and Wade. Casey, who had been despondent about his situation, started to get...