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6 Tips for Better Meetings
Article

6 Tips for Better Meetings

Any questions? Good.

Alyson Krueger
The New York Times, 2023
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Editorial Rating

5

Qualities

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  • For Beginners

Recommendation

Jason Fried, the CEO of software firm Basecamp, once likened meetings to salt, which ought to be “sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful.” Indeed, too much salt ruins a meal, just as too many meetings extinguish team morale. In this brief yet pithy New York Times article, lifestyle writer Alyson Krueger, citing Steven G.Rogelberg’s The Surprising Science of Meetings, presents six ingredients that will enrich your meetings, allowing juicy ideas to bubble to the surface and marinade, while optimizing conditions to produce exquisite work.

Summary

Corporate leaders are finally recognizing that bad meetings needn’t be a sunk cost of doing business.

Meetings are often unnecessary soul-destroying wastes of time. For much of the industrial era, corporate leaders considered bad meetings to be a regrettable but unavoidable by-product of doing business, and they made little effort to solve the problem.

Nowadays, business leaders are finally recognizing that meetings can be tighter, more productive and more conducive to generating ideas and making decisions.

To improve your business meetings, replace the agenda with work-related questions, put an executive in charge of...

About the Author

Lifestyle writer Alyson Krueger is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fast Company, and more. 

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