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Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable About the Most Painful Problem in Business

by Patrick Lencioni
Jossey Bass, 2004

With perhaps the best business book title of all time, the content of this book lives up to its name.

Admit it: sometimes you would rather die than sit through another staff meeting. Consultant and author Patrick Lencioni picks up on that sentiment in his most recent book, Death by Meeting. Although much of our time in organizations is spent in meetings, we tend to complain about them as, at best, necessary evils. His conclusions, however, may be surprising, because in the end he suggests that organizations should actually have more meetings—not fewer—in order to solve this painful problem.

As in his other books, Lencioni first makes his point by telling a story—this time of a CEO at a software company whose new corporate parent is unhappy with the way he runs meetings at his organization. With the help of an upstart son of a colleague (whose expertise is primarily in screenwriting), the CEO transforms the way meetings are structured at the organization, with a resulting increase in productivity and morale.

After the story, Lencioni spells out the model underlying the fable. He asserts that there are two fundamental problems with the way meetings are run in organizations today. First, they lack conflict. Lencioni himself writes screenplays, and he has realized that no one will watch a movie that lacks drama or, more specifically, conflict. Yet in meetings, we avoid it, brush it aside, or promise to deal with it later. We steer meetings to safe (but boring) topics that tend to avoid the important issues that really need to be discussed. He provides valuable advice on how to “mine” for conflict and disagreement at meetings. Chronic conflict avoidance was also a primary topic in his earlier book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Second, he argues that meetings in most organizations lack “contextual structure.” That is, meetings inappropriately blend coverage of strategic, tactical, immediate, and long-term. Without a clear context for discussion, meetings typically fail to bring discussions to a useful conclusion, run over time, and frustrate participants. Lencioni provides a powerful structure for meetings that includes: daily “huddles,” for executives (no more than five minutes total to share what’s on tap for the day); weekly tactical meetings; monthly strategic meetings; and quarterly off-sites.

Lencioni’s arguments are compelling, and he provides detailed guidance on how to structure and run these meetings. In the end, well-run meetings are time savers. We may complain about time wasted in meetings now, yet we do not document the time we waste back in our offices dealing with emails and voice mails from our colleagues who are confused about the results of our previous meetings. Clear, contextual meetings that support healthy conflict and dialogue give us more time to devote to running organizations and will contribute to better bottom-line results.