The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance

I read this book in preparation for a course that I teach on management skills, which contains a module on how to conduct effective meetings. Dr. Rogelberg's "The Surprising Science of Meetings: How Can you Lead Your Team to Peak Performance" greatly advanced what I have been teaching for years. His book is chock full of practical advice and guidance that I both teach and put into my own practice when conducting meetings. Here's just a sample of what I took away: 1. Badly run meetings are a form of time-theft. 2. We all think we are great at conducting meetings, particularly those when we talk a lot...(stew on that for a minute). 3. Most people don't receive feedback on how good (or more often than not, badly) they conduct their meetings. 4. Agendas are a "hollow crutch". They don't ensure that a meeting will be productive. 5. People often don't prepare for meetings, but you can manage that. I strongly recommend those who are interested in making meetings not suck consider reading this book. You'll definitely walk away with a few ideas and tools for having more effective meetings.

To be honest most of the stuff is common sense and you actually know. The good thing about the book is even if you know all the stuff you will systematize your knowledge which is a good thing. The book suggests that meeting online is not a productive thing and these days we actually meet entirely online which I personally hope will change soon. The good part of the book is how to brainstorm in a meeting and I personally will take this from this book.

Steven Rogelberg's The Surprising Science of Meetings is a breath of fresh air among the myriad leadership and management books out there. That's because this book is based upon a solid foundation of social science, which then flows naturally into actionable recommendations. In my numerous conversations with executives and MBA students over the years, I've heard my fair share of complaints about meetings. I will certainly be sharing this book with them as a timeless resource. Readers will be pleased to find that the book has plenty of data to back up its main points, yet simultaneously offers key takeaways at the end of each chapter. The book also has a number of useful tools and quick references at the end, presented in an easy-to-use format that any leader could start using immediately. Highly recommended!

I approached this book with great anticipation, but ended it sorely disappointed. If you have read anything in the past few years about improving meetings, you will find little of value from the text. It does highlight some studies that can give you some evidence-based thinking to support changes you make, but otherwise the ideas it explores and the advice it offers is both basic and fairly well-known.

Steven Rogelberg has written a highly approachable, useful book aimed at making meetings more effective. The book clearly lays out why most people groan at the thought of yet one more meeting, and provides techniques and tips for improving meetings. I thought it was really important that these tips and techniques are based on years of research by the author himself and by others in the field, and that this research occurred in many different settings (e.g., lab studies, field studies, surveys, etc.). It's important to know that this book doesn't argue for a one-size-fits-all "prescription" for meetings, rather that there are things meeting leaders need to think about and do before, during, and after meetings that will help. I found a lot to like about this book, so it is difficult to pick a favorite tip, but the two chapters I find myself thinking about now having finished the book are the one on agendas and the one on remote call-in meetings. My department uses agendas for all meetings, but this chapter has given me ideas for improving them. And, increasingly, we find people want to call in to meetings, but this is rarely effective. If you lead meetings at your organization, you'll appreciate Rogelberg's book.

As someone who both attends and leads a significant number of meetings each week, I placed a lot of hope in this book. It did not disappoint. Dr. Rogelberg calls out the need to evaluate and improve meetings, without diminishing their value. We need meetings to give team members voice and to enhance our decision making and implementation. This book highlights recognizable pitfalls (Parkinson’s law!) and provides a range of practical and reasonable tools to call upon to accomplish these goals without wasting time. I even gained insight into how I can be a better participant. Unexpectedly, it was refreshing to see some of the things my organization is already doing right – gold stars for food and laughter. This book needs to be on more shelves.

I have been working in the professional high-tech world for over forty years. I'm still in the game and at a senior management level (COO) always looking for ways to make the ship run better. This book is not a panacea to time wasted in meetings, but then again the author is the first one to caution us as to the perils of eating the lotus flower of magic meeting curatives. After spending what may be a little much space on the background of meeting time and efficiency, he goes on to examine how to actually conduct a more efficient meeting and the culture one needs to nurture this going forward. He emphasizes that there are no shortcuts and that great meetings require a cultural buy in in the team as well as training and leadership by example. That is, the moment the people at the top show poor meeting discipline, so will the team go too. I would give this mercifully compact book a five rating, but I think the beginning background could have been more condensed. Other than that, a valuable resource I will make a core of our company meeting training. If we are successful, I believe we can make meetings a widely recognized asset of our company rather than a due to be paid.

As someone who has been in the corporate minutiae of day to day meetings where I was sometimes lucky to get a 15-minute break over the course of a 9-hour day, Steven Rogelberg's book was practical, thought-provoking, and even had me laughing with its inserts of humor. By treating meetings as events (like a wedding) where one takes pause to consider others and their time and to think about the details, flow and experience, Steven begins to demonstrate how we can all make a huge impact on the modern work day. I appreciated how the book included a nice balance between science and practice, including valuable tools throughout and summaries at the end of each chapter. As a leadership development professional who has both lived in the daily world of meetings and coaches and develops executives, this is a book that will be on my list of recommendations to friends, colleagues, and clients.

Good structure and overview of the science of meetings. A good reminder that organisation performance is the responsibility of everyone in the team. If you want to run better meetings and make good decisions while respecting one of the most difficult commodity in business which is time, share the responsibilities to everyone and be actively present in the meetings.

...wird in diesem Buch anhand von vielen Beispielen und Studien sehr gut abgehandelt. Nach meiner Kenntnis das beste Buch auf dem Markt hierzu.

The book content is not so innovative.

Great way to evaluate your meetings.

Aprenda como fazer reuniões altamente produtivas e motivadoras.