Traditional meetings are a weapon of mass interruption. Long live the Modern Meeting! The average American office worker spends eleven hours in meetings every week. Yet all that time sitting around a conference table hasn’t made us more productive. If anything, meetings have made work worse. Traditional meetings reduce efficiency, kill urgency, and breed compromise and complacency. Worst of all, our dysfunctional meeting culture changes how we focus, what we focus on, and what decisions we make. But there is a solution, a way to have fewer, shorter, more purposeful meetings. It’s called the Modern Meeting Standard. By following its eight simple but radical principles you may never have to attend a useless meeting again. Read This Before Our Next Meeting is the call to action you (and your boss) need. "Compromise, status quo, deficient organization–like a physician’s bag overflowing with powerful medicines, Al Pittampalli’s new book delivers the prescription for an organization suffering from meeting malaise." — Marshall Goldsmith , author of the New York Times bestsellers MOJO and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There "If you find yourself withering away in endless meetings, if your organization suffers from consensus constipation, if you can’t seem to get a decision made this centur y, read this book." — Russell Bishop , senior editor at large, Huffington Post , and author of Workarounds That Work "I dutifully avoid meetings whenever possible, which is pretty much always. If I were to go to meetings, though, I’d want Al to run them. And if that wasn’t possible, I’d send this book to everyone else ahead of time and wait for them to cancel the meeting or run it exactly how this book describes." — Chris Guillebeau , author of The Art of Non-Conformity "Sucked dry, worn down, numbed out: pick your metaphor. Any way you cut it, bad meetings are killing you and your organization. This book will be your shield and sword to get your life back. Now we just need to sort out email." — Michael Bungay Stanier , author of Do More Great Work AL PITTAMPALLI is the founder of the Modern Meeting Company, which has helped organizations like NASA, IBM, Abbott Labs, and Kaiser Permanente hold more effective meetings. He is a former IT adviser at Ernst & Young LLP and lives in New York City. You can learn more about him at: modernmeetingstandard.com. Title Page Copyright PREFACE WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING? THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF MODERN MEETINGS YOU MUST DECIDE THE MODERN MEETING STANDARD FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MODERN MEETING MORE QUESTIONS? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE When I first began writing Read This Before Our Next Meeting , I remember telling myself that if it earned 5,000 readers, it would be a huge success. To my jubilation, four years later, the book is out in over 100,000 copies all over the world (it’s been translated into five foreign languages). I’ve also had the privilege of helping some of the world’s brightest organizations—NASA, IBM, Abbott Labs, Hewlett Packard, American Electric Power, Hertz and more—implement the book’s principles. One of the best things about having your ideas in the hands of so many is the feedback it produces. Countless executives, managers, and HR personnel have reached out to me to share inspiring success stories. And I do appreciate every one of them, but what’s far more valuable to me is the sincere criticism from thoughtful readers on how some of the ideas in the book fell short for them. I take these criticisms very seriously, and as a result, I’ve learned a great deal from them. That’s why I’m so thrilled to finally get the opportunity to update the book based on those insights.