Patrick Lencioni “Death by Meeting”

Before diving into the book Death by Meeting, I’d like to share how I first became acquainted with the author’s work.

Patrick Lencioni is a very unconventional business writer and consultant. He is best known as the author of the bestseller The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This isn’t a typical management book—many refer to it as a business novel. I’m not sure if Lencioni invented this style or if someone else had done it before him, but when I read the book, I found the approach intriguing. It’s a book about management, but written as a work of fiction about the life of a team. Essentially, he takes a business problem, “creates” a company and characters around it, and tells a story that illustrates how to solve the problem in question.

I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team about five or six years ago, and I really liked it. That’s when I realized the author had earned his own spot on my “to-read” list.

In 2017, I read his second book, The Advantage, which carries the subtitle “Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business.” This is a more traditional management book, not a business novel. However, it made an even greater impression on me than the first one. I found myself taking notes on almost every page and reading selected quotes to my colleagues. It’s truly an excellent book and in many ways echoes Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last, which I also highly recommend. Meanwhile, my colleagues were already discussing another book by Patrick Lencioni—Death by Meeting. That’s the one I’d like to talk about now.

This book is yet another business novel. This time, the main problem is meetings. In large companies, there are many of them, and they take up most of the executives’ working time. However, in many companies, meetings tend to be ineffective, become a dreaded obligation for employees, and ultimately drag the company down.

Patrick Lencioni illustrates this through yet another (presumably fictional?) company. The company is successful, the leaders are smart, but ineffective meetings threaten to result in the founder being ousted from his position. Then, a young but unconventional employee, who initially joined just to fill in for the personal assistant on maternity leave, suddenly shows the leader how to drastically change the situation and turn meetings into a powerful tool for achieving goals.

Since this is a business novel, the book reads more like a work of fiction, with many of the problems feeling familiar from everyday work life.

The core idea is simple: you can’t get rid of meetings altogether. They are exactly what competent managers are paid for:

Think about it this way. For those of us who lead and manage organizations, meetings are pretty much what we do. Afterall, we’re not paid for doing anything exceedingly tangible orphysical, like delivering babies or kicking field goals or doing stand-up comedy. Whether we like it or not, meetings are the closest thing to an operating room, a playing field, or a stagethat we have.

But they aren’t paid just for the sake of having meetings; they’re paid if the meetings help solve problems and move the company forward.

Through examples, the author demonstrates that meetings should be divided into different types: from quick status updates to larger, off-site strategic sessions. Each type has its own goals and methods of execution, and it’s important not to try to combine everything into one.

Moreover, ALL participants need to be actively engaged, not just “present” at yet another obligatory meeting.

I have to say that this book felt weaker to me than The Advantage. It lacks the emotional involvement from the author that was so palpable in The Advantage (where his emotions just poured off the pages). However, the book accomplishes its goal. It provides a more structured way of thinking about why and how we hold meetings. So I definitely recommend it. And I’ve got a couple more of his books lined up next.

My rating: 4/5

Patrick Lencioni “Death by Meeting”

buy