Business Meetings
The Complete Handbook of
Business Meetings is intended to assist you and your organization in having meetings that
are more productive and more inclusive, leading to wiser and better collective decisions.
It provides practical and proven tools for the planning and management of meetings. For
the more formal meetings, the book demystifies and humanizes the rules of order. It should
induce creative thinking, questioning of entrenched practices, and the adoption of
alternative approaches to collective decision making. Ultimately, this book stands to help
you in increasing the returns on the substantial investments made in a meeting.
This book will serve the
following readers:
Meeting chairs who need
tools to better manage time, issues, and people in meetings
Meeting attendees who need
tools to participate more effectively and to assert themselves without getting angry
Chief executive officers who
need tools to work more effectively with their governing boards
Staff who record minutes,
design agendas, and coordinate meeting logistics
This book provides tools to
plan, chair, or participate in a variety of meetings: small or large, informal or formal,
harmonious or controversial. It is assumed that there is a desire or a requirement to
involve members in meaningful discussions and decision making (otherwise why waste
their time in a meeting?). Among others, the methods apply to:
Informal meetings of staff
committees or larger staff gatherings
Formal meetings of governing
boards, councils, and commissions
Large meetings of members of
nonprofit organizations, cooperatives, or home owners
General meetings of
shareholders of public companies
Public meetings and hearings
sponsored by municipal and other statutory bodies
In more than 15 years in
practice I have noted the consistent frustration of my clients with books on meeting
dynamics and rules of order. Complaints have included: This is such a thick book. Less
than 1% of it applies to us, and it would take a detective to discover the 1% that we
need.
The rules of order are
mechanical and artificial, and they stop the free and creative flow of ideas.
How can a person who was
elected president be expected to memorize this many rules? The structure appears to
constrain us and slow progress down."
In response to these
comments, I have ventured to give you proven tools and ideas for today's meetings. The
focus is on advice that is practical, relevant, and readily usable. This advice can save
you time and money and can help you build organizational consensus and harmony. As a
result, you should be able to use much more than 1% of this book's content immediately,
and you should not have to rely on a parliamentary expert to find or interpret what you
need.
In this book, I question the
conventional wisdom, and challenge you to think and operate "outside the box."
By doing so, you will look beyond mechanics and will examine fundamental principles and
broad perspectives. I question common practices and dispel myths, as well as make
suggestions for discarding procedures that waste time and don't make sense. You will leam
ways to shift to a simpler and more user-friendly approach.
318pages