November 9, 2012

No More Pointless Meetings by Martin Murphy - GIVEAWAY


If you’ve had a job outside the home, chances are you’ve sat through at least one meeting wondering why the group was wasting so much time. Martin Murphy addresses this problem in “No More Pointless Meetings” by applying workflow management to leverage the brainpower of the participants.  For every session format he offers, having a purpose statement is key.  Many meetings fail due to lack of purpose. And without really listening, any efforts to collaborate will probably not be effective.

For me, I thought the book was just “okay”.  I tend to be a meeting participant more than the meeting driver so there weren’t as many takeaways for me.  I suppose I was expecting some quick suggestions for what to do when you’re suffering through a never-ending meeting you didn’t want to attend in the first place.  However, people who regularly lead meetings or facilitate retreats for outside groups will probably use his material in their preparation.

GIVEAWAY:  I am giving away a copy of this book to any reader in the US (shipping is on me!). If you're a facilitator, you'll probably get a lot out of it. To enter, tell me about one of the most mind-numbing meetings you’ve attended in the below comments.  The winner will be randomly selected and announced here on Saturday, November 17th.

Disclaimer: I received this book for free from AMA in exchange for an honest review.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

How about a 30 minute meeting that went for almost 2 hours?

Mary

Unknown said...

I had a client a few months ago who I struggled to keep focused during meetings. We would meet to get a simple task done and she would go off on tangents way too often.

I eventually had to refund the money and gracefully bow out of the projects and we met way too often and got little accomplished

Brie said...

My boss loves to have meetings, it drives the entire HR department nuts!

I hold a meeting once a week with new hires at our firm, its basically orienation. Sometimes I notice people struggle to pay attention, but I am forced to spend two hours getting them "oriented" with the company. I would love ideas on how to improve it!

Musings of a newlywed said...

I work on one client full time and I'm in the PR business. In 2010, we had a major product launch coming up and the client locked 47 people in a room for ELEVEN hours with only apple pie, sugary sodas, candy and pizza and said we couldn't leave until we came up with something brilliant. Ideas got worse as people consumed more and more sugar and included:
-project the product on the moon
-create a massive traffic jam on LA's 405 and give away the product to one lucky winner stuck in traffic
-hack into all major news sites and do a hostile takeover
-mail parts of the product (huge machine) to random people with a plane ticket and make them build it in Time Square

Needless to say, we ended the day with nearly nothing and a few of us worked up a much more sane and very successful plan that weekend.

Tina said...

Great stories! No surprise that many have sat through rough meetings. Brie- you're the winner, so if you send a mailing address through the contact form, I'll get it out to you.

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