Read This Before Our Next Meeting: How We Can Get More Done

Preparation starts with the meeting leader. He or she must create an agenda and a set of background materials.

If you don’t receive an action plan from the meeting I invited you to attend, you have every right not to attend my next one.

The ground rules: Let’s invite people who are passionate about the idea. A passionate intern is better than a disinterested executive. Let’s praise liberally. No criticism, not even evaluation. This is not a regular meeting. If it turns into one, then we have failed. Let’s make sure that the measured output of the meeting is the breadth and quantit

Decisions have always been what move us to act. They precede all change. They define our organization. Brave decisions lead to a brave organization; fearful decisions lead to a fearful one. So the opportunity is this: We must structure the Modern Meeting so that bold decisions happen often and quickly, and those decisions are converted into movemen

Efficient systems should be organized around the output that wants to be optimized: in our case, the work.

After the meeting, the leader should make sure participants are doing what they agreed to do, when they agreed to do it. Hold them accountable. If you don’t, who will?

Culture change occurs when a transformational idea spreads to enough people that a massive paradigm shift occurs. Like a virus that makes its way from person to person, spreading exponentially faster, so can the Modern Meeting, until so many people adopt it that a new meeting culture emerges.

In the Modern Meeting, the decision is king. All hail the king.

Part of the obligation of the Modern Meeting is that if you want attendance, you must reciprocate with an action plan. That plan should include at least the following: What actions are we committing to? Who is responsible for each action? When will those actions be completed?