Table of Contents:
CHAPTER ONE: What’s Going On?
CHAPTER TWO: Well-Designed Meetings Can Make a Difference
CHAPTER THREE: How Can You Design Meetings that Matter?
CHAPTER FOUR: Leading Meetings that Matter
CHAPTER FIVE: What is the Place Just Right?
CHAPTER SIX: What if Everyone is Somewhere Else?
CHAPTER SEVEN: Designing and Leading Extraordinary Meetings
CHAPTER EIGHT: Building a Constructive Conversational Culture
AFTERWORD: Continuing the Conversation
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From the Forward by Jim Horan:
The nature of conversation and communication has changed dramatically. We find ourselves communicating faster, more frequently, over greater distances, and with many more people. Yet we seem to be less effective.
Why is that so? Because of technology every business is now doing business globally; there are almost no meaningful geographic boundaries any more. Yes, there are still a few basically local businesses – the barbershop, the nail salon, the local farmers market. But almost everybody else is now doing business regionally, nationally, and internationally.
We are also starting up businesses at a much faster rate. There is an expectation that a business can go from startup to scale-up in a much shorter period of time.
What that really means is that organizations must build consensus and make decisions rapidly. When we think about meetings and how central they are to doing business in this global economy, we must align individual ideas and reach group decisions much more quickly than we have in the past. If we don’t our competitors will beat us in the marketplace.
And yet the habits and patterns we have developed about verbal dialogue are still stuck somewhere in the 1950s, 60s, and/or 70s. We’ve made all kinds of advances in the way we communicate with written words. We can email, we can text, we can tweet; we’ve figured out to do that with fewer words and characters, and much more rapidly….
From the Introduction:
We are in the middle of a fundamental revolution in the way we live, work, communicate, collaborate, and learn, and the workforce is voting with its feet. The economic recovery is presenting capable workers with more options, and they are taking advantage of them.
What’s going on? In this book I suggest that the way we live and work has changed so dramatically in the last twenty years that our basic leadership beliefs and practices are no longer appropriate. We have information and tools at our disposal that were unheard of, and even unimaginable, just a few decades ago.
But the way we are trying manage is still mired in nineteenth-century assumptions about people, technology, economic value, and social well-being. The dominant “Command and Control” mind-set of most executives is out of sync with the world as it now operates.
And that misalignment shows up most prominently in the millions of corporate meetings that take place every day. If you can learn to talk with your staff and colleagues more respectfully, more candidly, and with more curiosity, you will not only feel better about your work experiences, you will also learn more, be more creative, and generate more value for your customers and shareholders.
This book is dedicated to the proposition that no one individually is smarter than all of us together. In the digital age collaboration beats control; power – and impact – comes from being connected, and from orchestrating collaboration.