Let’s Stop Meeting Like This

People usually dislike meetings. Often, meetings only waste time and build frustration. Yet organizations need their people to confer or need to hold meetings to unite a team or fulfill a specific goal. Employee-involvement specialists Dick and Emily Axelrod offer worthwhile strategies and methods to make your meetings more effective. Most of their ideas are pretty sensible; for example, involving all the participants in the advance design of a meeting. A few seem silly, if well-intentioned, like having competing groups build towers with raw spaghetti, marshmallows and duct tape. Overall, the Axelrods provide pithy quotations and useful, hands-on information – warmly infused with a sense that they actually care how your meetings work out. They cover planning, designing, facilitating and leading group sessions. The book’s art direction helps with a clean layout and lively, silhouette illustrations. getAbstract recommends the Axelrod approach to managers, executives, start-ups and anyone responsible for organizing meetings.