Read This Before Our Next Meeting
By: Al Pittampalli
Published: August 3, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 80 pages
ISBN-10: 1936719169
ISBN-13: 978-1936719167
Publisher: The Domino Project
" One mediocre meeting after another corrodes our organization, and every day we allow it to happen" writes speaker, blogger, change agent, and founder of The Modern Meeting Company, Al Pittampalli, in his action oriented manifesto on ending bad meetings, Read This Before Our Next Meeting. The author describes how to end the bad meeting culture that permeates organizations, and how to replace it with the corporate culture changing modern meeting.
Al Pittampalli recognizes that meetings are not only necessary but can even achieve results. While this concept may seem radical to veterans of useless and time consuming traditional meetings, the author offers timely advice for holding useful meetings. Al Pittampalli provides evidence that the standard format meeting is not only bad and a waste of valuable time, but is also counterproductive to the overall goals and culture of the company. For the author, bad meetings destroy any sense of urgency, and replace that critical time element with a sense that perhaps time is not that important after all. For organizations facing stiff competition, this loss of urgency fostered through pointless meetings, can cause serious harm to the business. As a result, the author recommends an entirely new approach to how meetings are thought about and conducted by organizations at all levels.
Al Pittampalli (photo left) understands that the traditional meeting has simply devolved into another communication tool that serves little real purpose. Instead of wasting the potential power of a meeting on mundane communication, Al Pittampalli proposes that meetings should instead be considered as a last resort. This key insight forms the basis for the author's sole reason to hold meetings. That reason is to support decisions. The author shares the tools for transforming meetings into decision making vehicles that propel the organization forward, and that achieve real results. To that end, Al Pittampalli offers his seven principles of the Modern Meeting Standard:
* Meet only to support a decision already made
* Move fast and end on schedule
* Limit the number of attendees
* Reject the unprepared
* Produce committed action plans
* Refuse to be informational. Reading the memo is mandatory
* Work with brainstorms, not against them
For me, the power of the book is how Al Pittampalli turns traditional and ingrained thinking about meetings upside down. The concept of the modern meeting is revolutionary as it removes all of the standard meeting reasons from the table, with the exception of supporting decisions. The author shares his seven principles of successful modern meetings, and provides an explanatory chapter on each one, to support his reasoning. In the end, the author strives to transform moribund corporate cultures where meetings became a crutch for inaction, into dynamic organizational cultures where meetings serve a real purpose.
I highly recommend the revolutionary and must read book Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli, to anyone seeking an effective and results based alternative to the standard, time wasting meeting. This book changes the way people will think about meetings and their true purpose, restoring the importance of meetings as agents of change and advancement.
Read the idea filled and essential book Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli, and discover not only how to conduct more effective meetings, but why the meeting should even happen in the first place. This book is a guerrilla guide to better and more effective meetings.
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