Startup CEO, 2nd Edition

Chapter 26Meeting Routines

Without question, board meetings and team offsites are some of the most productive and enjoyable experiences of my professional life. As far as meetings go, they represent an extremely small slice of what can be a very big problem. CEOs go to dozens of meetings a week. It's important to keep them valuable and productive and to avoid “death by meeting.”

Lencioni’s Meeting Framework

As I mentioned earlier, Patrick Lencioni is one of my favorite business writers and we now use his framework for mission, vision, and values from The Advantage at Return Path. He's also written a series of “business fables,” all of which include valuable lessons that are easy to understand and easy to communicate. His books include The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (on how to create meaning for people in their day‐to‐day work when they're not doing something intrinsically meaningful like curing a disease or feeding the homeless), The Five Temptations of a CEO (a summary of five leadership traps every CEO has to avoid), The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (the flipside of The Five Temptations, focusing on positive traits) – and Death by Meeting.

Death by Meeting isn't about attending too many meetings, which is what I've always called “death by meeting.” It's about staff meetings that bore you to death. With a great story featuring characters named Casey and Will (my two oldest kids' names, which had me chuckling the whole time), Lencioni describes a framework ...