- ISBN13: 9780910627917
- Condition: New
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Product Description
A study by MCI found that most professionals believe that over 50 percent of meeting time is wasted. More than 90 percent admit to daydreaming in meetings, 73 percent have brought other work, and 39 percent have fallen a… More >>
Successful Meetings: How to Plan, Prepare, and Execute Top-Notch Business Meetings
This book could help anyone create a successful meeting. I’ve had meetings before where only 3 people show up on time (out of 15 invitees!) and I didn’t know what to do. If I had read this book then, I would have known how to encourage prompt arrival prior to the meeting and wouldn’t have had that problem. I really like the section on how to set up the room. At my office, most of the meeting rooms are already arranged, but if I took the time to rearrange the chairs, it would have a dramatic effect on the participation. Overall, this book provides a great overview for how to lead a meeting that gets results. It covers the basic logistical issues as well as tips for encouraging participation, leading brainstorming sessions, who you really need to invite (and not invite), and ideas for resolving personal conflicts between participants. Henkel provides checklists and forms to make the planning process easy and fool-proof. Also, the writing style is simple and easy to understand, including many lists that help clarify the topic. The section on icebreakers is very useful, especially if you are leading a meeting for people that don’t always work together as a group. Often, these icebreakers can make for a more productive meeting since people are more likely to share their ideas with people they feel they know. I would recommend this book to anyone planning on leading a meeting (big or small). It will make a world of difference!
Rating: 5 / 5
Tired of boring meetings that seem pointless from start to finish? Whether you’re leading or participating in a business meeting, it shouldn’t be a painful process. In Successful Meetings, Shri Henkel strips the business meeting down to its bare bones, dissects and explains each and every aspect and builds it back up to a productive, stimulating and effective gathering.
Meeting participants and leaders share equal responsibility in ensuring any given meeting’s success – but how is it possible to contribute your best without the right tools? Ineffective business meetings are a waste of time, energy and money. Thankfully, you won’t have to suffer through one again after reading and applying Henkel’s innovative techniques in your business. Even the office rookie becomes the shining star, once they are able to communicate their ideas effectively, contribute and even steer the course of a business meeting. Successful Meetings takes your meeting idea through initial and strategic planning, setting the tone, injecting humor without straying off course, stimulating participants, maximizing productivity and even measuring your success afterwards.
I enjoyed the straightforward, no-nonsense style of Henkel’s guide. The logical layout guides the reader through each and every consideration possible, while remaining surprisingly light and readable. I highly recommend this book to anyone in business who will, at some point or another, engage in a meeting with their coworkers, whether they are leading the meeting or simply taking part. Every minute spent reading this guide is an hour you won’t have to spend twiddling your thumbs through another dry, directionless meeting.
Rating: 5 / 5
Meetings have to rank as one of the most loathed activities in modern corporate life. While the idea of coming together as a group to collectively solve problems or brainstorm new ideas sounds good, poor planning and management too often leads to fuzzy, disorganized sessions in stuffy conference rooms. In surveys, 90% of respondents admit to daydreaming during meetings, almost 75% say they have sometimes brought other work, and 9% say they have fallen asleep.
Shri Henkel believes she knows how to change all that. Her book, Successful Meetings: How to Plan, Prepare and Execute Top-Notch Business Meetings, is a great step-by-step guide running meetings that produce results. Rather than begin from the premise that all meetings are necessary, Henkel starts out by suggesting that the reader ask themselves a very basic question: is this meeting really necessary? Could these issues be tackled in a different way? She even suggests costing the meeting out, so the reader can see how much money a meeting will consume in staff salary, equipment costs, and of course, snacks.
Once you’ve determined that a meeting is necessary, Henkel has a wide variety of ideas on how to set agendas and keep to it, how to encourage active participation among staff, how to capture ideas for later use, and how to receive feedback so the next meeting is even better. An entire chapter is devoted to feel-good “team building” exercises designed to open up communications and get the thoughts flowing. All in all, this would be a great book for any middle or upper-level manager looking to run their meetings more effectively.
Rating: 5 / 5
Change is difficult. Much as we love new ideas and new technology, changing to respond to innovations, competitive threats and opportunities is often seen as an arduous process. People who can manage change are leaders who command respect and admiration within their organizations.
Meetings are a key part of managing change. Whether you are brainstorming, planning or presenting results, more often than not you will be doing it in a meeting as part of a group process. Understanding what makes a meeting a success will help you create vibrant, productive forums where you can achieve common objectives.
“Successful Meetings” teaches you the art of creating a successful meeting. Whether it’s arranging the room, inviting the right people or using the right technology, Shri Henkel takes you step-by-step through the process of running any type of meeting and provides valuable insights along the way. If your meetings aren’t motivating, or worse yet, if they are “good enough”, you need this book. Read it and your commitment to excellence will be well rewarded.
Rating: 5 / 5
Shri Henkel has done very well with this book, in that she lists and explains all the typical stages of planning and holding an effective meeting. This book covers all stages of a meeting from the planning stage and whether or not a meeting is necessary through the logistics of setup and what type of meeting you are trying to hold. To ways to get the group involved in the meeting and the defining characteristic of an effective meeting, how to get the things done that the meeting was called for. She covers how to ask for help and get it, from recruiting coworkers to share the responsibilities of the meeting with, to asking for feedback from a completed meeting.
It was very informative for me to see a successful meeting broken down into all of its components. This allowed me to see what I already knew and those things that I knew were missing, but not quite what they were. This book is written from the point of view that would be beneficial to both the novice and accomplished meeting leader. It gives interesting ways to make sure things are going smoothly and if not, suggestions on how to get the meeting back on track. While reading this book, I definitely recognized room setups and strategies that have been used on me as an attendee at those meetings where I thought the leader or presenter did an excellent job.
Nothing like reading a how-to book and going, “yes, I’ve seen that done,” or “yep, I’ve seen that done before but I didn’t realize why it worked so well until now.” Things like that only solidify for me how well a specific technique works, and there are multitudes of these experiences described in this book. I especially liked all the charts and lists included in each section to help the novice meeting leader stay on track. She has also written in a way that you feel she is talking with you about the various styles or how not to do things. I enjoyed this as well because I’ve read several “how-to” books where it read either very robotic like instructions on how to put something together, or they read like the author is talking at you or down to you. This book is a must read for anyone who is trying to improve their meeting skills or are facing their first meeting!
Rating: 5 / 5