Meetings don’t have to be painfully inefficient snoozefests—if you design them. Meeting Design will teach you the design principles and innovative approaches you’ll need to transform meetings from boring to creative, from wasteful to productive. Meetings can and should be indispensable to your organization; Kevin Hoffman will show you how to design them for success.

Have you just been asked to chair a meeting, or take the minutes, or set up a meeting agenda? Need some help? Would samples of an agenda or minutes be useful? What about some techniques for chairing a meeting or dealing with difficult people? Then this "How to ." book is for you. In it you will find: how to decide whether there should be meeting how to set up the agenda the importance of setting timeframes in the agenda-and sticking to them how to make sure that time is not wasted and the important items are covered how to chair the meeting how to stop time wasters and to make sure you spend the right time on the right topics how the minute taker can collect the right information during the meeting how to write the minutes how to get the best out of the participants how to deal with difficult people There are also: a checklist for the meeting chair agenda example and agenda template minutes example and minutes template a checklist for how to improve your meetings a checklist for getting the best out of people a checklist for the minute taker a checklist for dealing with disagreements, differences and conflict

This book will change your mind forever about that "useless" meeting you are forced to attend. Paul Axtell emphasizes that meetings are vital to the work of successful organizations--we need to master the skill sets for designing, leading, and participating in meetings. A consultant with more than 30 years in the business, Axtell outlines 8 strategies with a host of compelling ideas you can put into action immediately. This is a book for the manager who recognizes that meetings are at the core of the work you do, the supervisor who wants to be wonderful to work for, the employee who wants to contribute as much as possible, the project leader who wants every team meeting to add velocity to the project. Meetings are essential. So let's make them work.

Traditional meetings are a weapon of mass interruption. Long live the Modern Meeting! The average American office worker spends eleven hours in meetings every week. Yet all that time sitting around a conference table hasn’t made us more productive. If anything, meetings have made work worse. Traditional meetings reduce efficiency, kill urgency, and breed compromise and complacency. Worst of all, our dysfunctional meeting culture changes how we focus, what we focus on, and what decisions we make. But there is a solution, a way to have fewer, shorter, more purposeful meetings. It’s called the Modern Meeting Standard. By following its eight simple but radical principles you may never have to attend a useless meeting again. Read This Before Our Next Meeting is the call to action you (and your boss) need.

Preface -- Setting the meeting stage -- So many meetings and so much frustration -- Get rid of meetings? no, solve meetings through science -- Evidence-based strategies for leaders -- The image in the mirror is likely wrong -- Meet for 48 minutes -- Agendas are a hollow crutch -- The bigger, the badder -- Don't get too comfortable in that chair -- Deflate negative energy from the start -- No more talking! -- The folly of the remote call-in meeting -- Putting it all together -- Epilogue: trying to get ahead of the science' using science -- Tool: meeting quality self-assessment -- Tool: sample engagement survey and 360 feedback questions on meetings -- Tool: good meeting facilitation checklist -- Tool: huddle implementation checklist -- Tool: agenda template -- Tool: guide to taking good meeting minutes/notes -- Tool: expectations assessment -- Acknowledgments -- References -- Index

An essential guide for facilitating productive, decisive meetings. Meetings are well-known time-wasters that often produce no meaningful business results. How to Conduct Productive Meetings enables anyone to plan and facilitate a fruitful, decisive meeting. Assess whether a meeting is actually necessary, ensure presentations are professional, facilitate constructive participation, and produce a meeting outcome that is measurable.