DEATH by Meeting
Patrick Lencioni
“Death by Meeting” is nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams, and create environments of engagement and passion.
A friend gave this book to my wife, and she read it across two days. I’ve never seen her so excited, even with the other books she’s reviewed for me (eg. Brew a Batch, Permission to Screw Up). This review is therefore written from her perspective.
The cover, as you can see, is a business guy head desking on top of a meeting agenda. I figured I’d just skim over it and then read the other bookies waiting in my bedroom. A trusted business friend recommended it to me – otherwise I wouldn’t have picked it up on my own. Once I had it, I thought I might get more insights into meetings.
Most of the book is a fictional story about a leadership team and how they are currently running their meetings. You get suckered in (invested) in how they improve their meetings. Given that it has this story you see real life examples of how it can be used and not just the plain theory. The characters give some of the reader’s thoughts back at them like ‘Why do we need more meetings? or ‘Really? You want me to do this in a meeting?’ where it is answered in the story as a group and the characters chatting about it.
Unlike the other business books where they try to cram in a bunch of theories and just hop about in meaningless or difficult to follow manner the story creates a framework. I would have preferred a little more of the ‘Fast Forward’ (non-fiction) at the end with the theories. This could have included more examples with the team doing the good meetings, the different types of good meetings. It was really interesting and enjoyable. This really has one meeting theory that can be summarized on a single page, so it’s not a reread of the whole book, just a revisit of the summarized theory at the back if need be.
Perhaps the most gleaming commendation for this book is that my wife stayed up late, and read this over two days. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so absorbed! Also, she’s a passionate fiction hater, and I could hardly believe she was reading a fictional story (and I teased her mercilessly too).
I wanted this to be new and innovative, but in the end I actually felt disappointed. I’ve read a similar novel/memoir in the past that still stuck with me. What really frustrated me about this was that it had a ‘fearless new talent’ but the writing itself wasn’t that amazing. It seemed to reply on shock factor, and speed, in order to keep the reader interested.
This is a rich novel that is intended to be confronting and powerful, but is instead I found it off putting. It seemed like a train wreck from the start, and yet I kept hoping for a satisfactory conclusion. Instead what I read made me feel irritated and grossed out. Also there were parts (such as Marco’s ?affair? with the butcher) that I didn’t understand the importance of. This is literature, not light reading. It demands attention and thinking that I just didn’t have the space to give.
This memoir almost moved me to tears with the hopelessness and frustration that leaked out of its pages. How could no-one help Lucia when she was obviously in so much pain? Surely bleeding from the vagina should always be treated as serious. I guess that this was some years ago, when endometriosis and Crohn’s Disease were poorly understood, and even more poorly treated.
This book left me with an incredibly bad mouth feel. I felt violated and unsatisfied, and frankly a bit offended! This is a vague retelling of Macbeth, but Macbeth was time-appropriate, and Shakespeare! Death and madness are no longer ‘normal’ (and therapy will help with avoiding both of those things).
This has what could be called a ‘slow burn’. There’s no real action, and no real climax to it. There are hints at the Orzone behind the Emperor Mage but that’s about it. It’s like the first Harry Potter books where the focus was on learning, and let’s face it, those books were my favorites for that reason!
I’m not really sure how old these kids are. Teenagers? I thought that I read somewhere that they are in junior high, but they certainly seem to have a lot of freedom in school for that. I’m a great believer in the power of education, and they don’t seem to spend much time at school! The only class they seem to do is art, and while I think it’s really important for expression, it’s not the only way to express yourself.