Rating: 
Summary: this "Fable" would never happen in the real world
Review: A group of opinionated, strong-willed executives talking rationally about topics that are going to decide the fate of their professional lives for the next six months? No wonder the author presents this as a fable! Let's face it, one of the things that makes people successful professionally is their confidence in their own ideas and their drive to see them implemented, which is precisely what makes it hard to get a group of such people to defer to one another and agree to someone else's idea. This book completely ignores this fact, and paints a very unrealistic picture of happy, cooperative coworkers all explaining their views in a professional, respectful manner. What about the personality traits that invariably serve to undermine even the most carefully planned or strictly controlled meeting? Arrogance, stubborness, and pride are the chief problem with meetings, in my experience, but this book teaches that boredom is the major problem and suggests the solution is creating conflict in meetings, even "mining" for it. Sure, that will eliminate boredom, but lead to all sorts of other problems like personal attacks and bitter fractionalization, which are even worse. This book's simplistic, idealist suggestions will only work in fairy tales, not in the real business world.
Rating: 
Summary: Instant Impact
Review: All of Pat's books have been a pleasure to read. However Death By Meeting had a significant impact on my organization within 24 hours. Pat lays out a easy way to make all those dreaded meetings fun and productive...quickly. We have ordered over 20 books to date and have been giving them out like candy to our staff and our customers
Rating: 
Summary: Good anecdotal advice, but targeted at upper management
Review: Both the format and the content of this book made it highly enjoyable. Normally, even reading about meetings is enough to put me to sleep, but this book has a great running story about introducing change to the meetings of an executive team. By the end of the book, the author has some excellent specific tips on the types of meetings to call, how often to call them, and what to expect to get from them. As he points out, the impact meeting effectiveness has on team morale can't be overstated.The only thing I might ding the book on is that it's really about the meetings that high-level folks have, and the practical advice is somewhat less applicable to minion-type people. For instance, while the different types of meetings make sense, the frequencies don't -- I would argue that his "quarterly off-site reviews" are better translated as "end of milestone reviews" the "monthly strategic"s are completely transformed because people at a lower level usually only own a few issues at a given time, so it makes more sense for all of those meetings to be ad-hoc and around closing a single topic rather than being regular and on the most important bubbled-up topics of the day. Still, a very valuable book and well worth an afternoon's read, even by low-level developer types like myself.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Read!
Review: Continuing the current hot trend of couching business counsel in fables, author Patrick Lencioni takes on the ogre of the deadly dull meeting and through story and advice, wrestles it to the ground. The book is in large part about boring meetings and the author manages to reproduce their tone exactly. The protagonists are the boss, Casey, and an employee named Will who eventually loses his temper in the face of one more stifling, useless meeting. The author plants lessons about meetings throughout the story, revealed by the characters' experiences. However, after the fable comes an undiluted section of advice: about 40 pages of straightforward, expository prose about how to have more effective, engaging meetings. If you want useful workday advice and prefer to save fairytales - even those with built-in lessons - for bedtime, start there. We welcome this solid guidance on how to make meetings work better.
Rating:
Summary: to conflict, or not to conflict?
Review: for a business management book, this one is pretty good. the fable is fairly interesting and the book is a fairly quick read. what makes this a 4 star book though is the concept of instilling conflict into meetings. too many executives feel the team concept requires acquiescence by the members. stay in your silo and nod approval. the importance of conflict not only adds interest to meetings, it creates open discussion and the exchange of different ideas and perspectives. it fosters the creative thought process. it challenges all members to problem solve. it requires the leader to support his position and suffer the pangs of self doubt. in the end you end up with a better decision--not a unanimous one. i am a believer that if you surround yourself with people who will only tell you what you want to hear, you don't need them. you need people who will challenge you to test your ideas and create different ones. if handled properly, your meetings won't just be more interesting, your decisions will be better! that's the message of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Lencioni scores another hit
Review: His previous book, "Five Disfunctions..." is by far the best work Lencioni has written to date, so "Death By Meeting" had quite a challenge to match when it came out. Although it falls a little short, still it accomplishes a task that cannot be diminished: it shows executives (and managers at large, I'd argue) how to make meetings more effective for once, and (are you ready for this?) he advocates for more, not less, meetings, in order to enhance the performance of companies and positively impact the lives of those who work in them. The book, like his previous ones, is cleverly structured in two large parts: The Fable and The Model. The first part lays out a sort of novel, where the characters could pretty much be you and me, taking part in management meetings in our own companies, and tells the story of how implementing his methodology (brought about by a "consultant in disguise", impersonated by the CEO's personal assistant) helped put the company's steering team out of its meeting "misery", by turning their meetings into a satisfactory and productive experience that they started looking forward to from then on. The second part summarizes the methodology presented in The Fable, in a more general context, by introducing the four types of meeting he advocates:
-Daily Check-In
-Weekly Tactical
-Monthly Strategic (or Ad Hoc Strategic)
-Quarterly Off-site Review Even if you think you are effective at managing your meetings, I highly recommend that you give "Death By Meeting" a read. It won't take more than 2 hours of your time, and it will provide you and your team with benefits to reap for life. Disregard at your own managerial risk!
Rating:
Summary: Lencioni scores another hit
Review: His previous book, "Five Disfunctions..." is by far the best work Lencioni has written to date, so "Death By Meeting" had quite a challenge to match when it came out. Although it falls a little short, still it accomplishes a task that cannot be diminished: it shows executives (and managers at large, I'd argue) how to make meetings more effective for once, and (are you ready for this?) he advocates for more, not less, meetings, in order to enhance the performance of companies and positively impact the lives of those who work in them. The book, like his previous ones, is cleverly structured in two large parts: The Fable and The Model. The first part lays out a sort of novel, where the characters could pretty much be you and me, taking part in management meetings in our own companies, and tells the story of how implementing his methodology (brought about by a "consultant in disguise", impersonated by the CEO's personal assistant) helped put the company's steering team out of its meeting "misery", by turning their meetings into a satisfactory and productive experience that they started looking forward to from then on. The second part summarizes the methodology presented in The Fable, in a more general context, by introducing the four types of meeting he advocates:
-Daily Check-In
-Weekly Tactical
-Monthly Strategic (or Ad Hoc Strategic)
-Quarterly Off-site Review Even if you think you are effective at managing your meetings, I highly recommend that you give "Death By Meeting" a read. It won't take more than 2 hours of your time, and it will provide you and your team with benefits to reap for life. Disregard at your own managerial risk!
Rating:
Summary: Completely unbelievable
Review: I agree with the other one-star reviews for this totally fabricated story. I mean, come on! This would simply never happen in the real corporate world, where new people are never listened to until they have "paid their dues" (and sometimes not even then!) The idea that meetings have some relationship to movies (if only) is just too precious for words, but some people apparently want to believe it can happen. I don't agree. I would love to see meetings improved in some meaningful way, but I don't think this book is going to make a substantive difference.
Rating:
Summary: A Cure for Bad Meetings
Review: I am ashamed to admit that as a leader I dread meetings. But, as Patrick Lencioni puts it in his newest book, Death by Meeting, meetings are the most important aspect of a leader's job. Thankfully, he provides a cure for bad meetings in this fascinating tale as he hones in on a specific meeting structure (Daily Check-in, Weekly Tactical, Monthly Strategic and
Quarterly Off-site Review) that is sure to make a difference in my organization.
Rating:
Summary: Death by Meeting
Review: I believe this book is meant for the harried executive who is too busy to read anything more substantial. The fable slant to the book makes it approachable. And at 255 pages, you could read it in a couple of hours. Admittedly, a typical CEO listening to a temporary assistant from the start, and the premise that the future of the CEO's job will be based on one meeting is a bit over the top, but in any event, the book's main purpose is to shed light on corporate realities, not to provide the Holy Grail of effective meetings. Scores of employees hate meetings because they're ineffective. No big idea there. One of the reasons people suffer horrible meetings is because they don't realize they're having ineffective meetings, they simply put up with them. And if they do realize they're wasting their time, they think it'll take too much time to fix. Why is there no conflict in meetings? Everyone wants to make sure they're politically correct. That's where the passion is -- hidden behind the PC veneer. While this book is not a handbook or a how-to, the effectiveness of his words lies in the implementation which happens in real-time (at individual companies), not at the theory level presented within the book's pages. To sum, this book is an enjoyable read, and it's commonsense when you look at it. However, if you're looking for the silver bullet, keep looking.
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