The key ideas

Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

Patrick Lencioni, 2004

A company’s CEO may be fired because of boring meetings. The solution his assistant offers sounds like a joke at his expense: they need more meetings and more debate in them. Patrick Lencioni’s business fable explores why a film is interesting while a staff meeting is boring, and how to organize meetings where decisions actually get made.

Who it is for

For leaders, project managers, and anyone who spends hours in meetings and leaves without decisions.

There is simply no substitute for a good meeting, lively, passionate, and focused, when you need to draw out a team’s collective wisdom.

What the book is about

A company has been sold to a large corporation. A representative of the new owner attends the weekly leadership meeting, watches it unfold, and leaves appalled. The CEO receives a warning: unless meetings change, his job is at risk.

The solution he eventually reaches sounds strange: there will be more meetings, with more debate in them.

Patrick Lencioni is an American management consultant and the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Death by Meeting is also a business fable: its characters and company are fictional. The story occupies most of the book, followed by a separate explanation of the author’s model. This is a consultant’s framework based on experience, not research findings.

Idea 1. Meetings nobody likes

Casey McDaniel was once a promising golfer, but in tournaments he developed the yips: a nervous disruption in which nothing is physically wrong, yet short shots stop working. He then combined golf with the computing he had studied at university and created a realistic golf game. Yip Software was born, and later acquired by Playsoft.

Casey is smart and generally a good boss. But his meetings start late, discuss the same things in circles, and never reach important matters. At one, his new assistant Will Peterson loses patience and says what everyone keeps quiet about: the meetings waste time, discuss nothing important, are skipped by the people needed, and leave everyone exhausted.

Casey initially defends himself: that is just what meetings are like. The book begins with this “just what they are like.”

For years, a team sits through a Monday staff meeting where everyone takes turns reading a report. Everyone complains, but only in private, and nobody proposes changing it.

Lencioni believes poor meetings are largely a matter of how they are organized. Meeting design can be changed.

Read in Livria

About the author

Patrick Lencioni is an American management consultant and founder of the consulting firm The Table Group. He writes business fables about teams and leadership, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

All books by this author: Patrick Lencioni

Terms from the book

  • Hook
  • Real-time permission: A technique in the author’s model, whose Russian label is translated by Livria: when debate becomes uncomfortable, the facilitator interrupts and reminds participants that this debate is necessary and useful.
  • Meeting stew: An image from the book: one meeting into which issues of different scales are thrown, from the week’s details to strategy.
  • Lightning round: Part of the tactical meeting in the author’s model: each person names their main tasks for the week in about a minute.
  • Real-time agenda: The tactical meeting’s agenda in Lencioni’s model: it is not prepared beforehand but determined after the lightning round and a look at the metrics.

All terms

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