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

Read This Before Our Next Meeting: How We Can Get More Done by Al Pittampalli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short manifesto deriding many types of meetings, and providing rules to apply to limit meetings to just the good kind. What is the good kind? Ones were decisions were already arrived at, where documentation has been passed along beforehand and studied beforehand, where there’s an agenda and a belief that the meeting will keep to the agenda, and where there are no extras or what I would call “professional meeting attendees without portfolio.” The author distinguishes types of meetings, and he focuses on ones that end with assigned action plans. There is also some discussion of informational meeting, social meetings, and brainstorming sessions, as well as conversations about meeting topics. Fortunately, in my current work I’ve been involved in very few of the meetings the author describes here, so I won’t be able to enact the advice given, but it’ll remind myself if I get back to those kinds of meetings. The best of the book is that it is short and high energy. Or at least high opinion. I’ve heard the concepts before, but they are put together in an entertaining way here. You can gather the author’s basic concepts by reading some of the more detailed book reviews.

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