For those of you familiar with his work, let me know your thoughts. For those of you that aren't incredibly familiar with his work, he is a long-time consultant who writes business narratives in order to drive home a central point, whether that be about meetings, silos, goals, etc.
And given the fact that I'm married to one of the most avid readers I know, I didn't have to go too far to start picking up some more Lencioni and diving right in.
First up, Death by Meeting
And it happened to be quite timely, because I had a little Death by Meeting experience yesterday, despite my best efforts in recent days to avoid such a travesty.
Rather than having a meeting for the sake of having a meeting, or spending hours on end in a conference room and getting nowhere, Lencioni argues that there are different formats, frequencies and agendas that one should have on their calendar. Honestly, it helped me think about work differently, which can't be a bad thing, right?
Some of what he covers in the book helped me try some different approaches to my day-to-day meetings, and I'm hoping that in the long run, my time, and my co-worker's time will be spent more effectively. I'll keep you posted.
Next up: Silos, Politics and Turf Wars
If you've spent any time in corporate America, you just might be familiar with the idea that a lot of folks have an "us vs. them" mentality in the work place. I can guarantee that folks, including myself, do at my office.
A lot of what Lencioni talks about in this book is familiar to the topics in "Frantic Family", especially the idea of setting a rallying cry to unite folks.
Man, how I wish that this were as easy to put in place as he makes it sound. The fictional story that he paints would be great if it were happening in real life, but from what I've seen, a lot of businesses are a long ways from getting there.
But I'm holding out some hope. And this did make me think of things a bit differently. I'd love to talk to some of the execs in my department about what they see as our rallying cry and what they think about working through some of the existing politics. I see how his concepts could work at a small company, but trying to get 80,000 people unified around a few core concepts is a bit of a daunting task.
And finally, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive
I'm about 1/3 of the way through this one, and I'm enjoying it. No, I am not an executive. Will I ever be? Who knows. But I don't think it can hurt to try to start thinking like one. Or to start thinking like an extraordinary one, at that ;)
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