Issue #4: Are Your meetings 5-Star Meetings?

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Question of the week: How are your meetings?  Do you love them?  

Yeah, neither do most people.  Complaining about meetings is a right of corporate passage. Everybody seems to hate them (while simultaneously feeling left out if not involved in them).  

Ugh.  

Peter Drucker had some pretty choice words about meetings:

“Meetings are, by definition, a concession to deficient organization.  For, one either meets or one works.”

Which is certainly a popular viewpoint.  

But we disagree.  

First, the definition of “meeting” has nothing to do with deficient organizational skills.  Dictionary.com defines a meeting as “a coming together.”  

And if you have ever tried to get a group of executives together, you know what kind of organizational skills that requires.

But aside from the snarky definition of definition, retort: meetings are important.

It is only by coming together that people have the opportunity to work on something together, solve problems together and get more done as a team than they would get done individually.  

Patrick Lencioni offers a completely different thought on meetings.  In HIS words:

Meetings are the linchpin of everything. If someone says you have an hour to investigate a company, I wouldn’t look at the balance sheet. I’d watch their executive team in a meeting for an hour. If they are clear and focused and have the board on the edge of their seats, I’d say this is a good company worth investing in.
Patrick Lencioni

The problem is not that we have meetings.  The problem is that we have bad meetings.  

That is why we came up with the 5-Star Leadership Meeting Agenda.  So that you (and we) have better, more productive meetings.  

Read more about meetings here and Download the agenda template here.

Tool Time

Who doesn’t love a good tool?  We are on the hunt for arbitrage tools… those that don’t cost a lot but deliver some alpha-like value.  

Check out Built with.  One of the most annoying tasks is sorting through plugins and tools to figure out the best way to build your website.  If you ever find yourself wondering how someone else built there’s, Built With will lift the veil.  Just use the tools your favorite site uses.  Skip the research.

And if you are stumped trying to figure out whose veil to lift, check out Similar Web. This is a nifty little tool that helps you discover what sites are related and how they rank.  Use it for some insightful competitive research.  

Any tools you would recommend?  Let us know.  

From Around the Web

💭 Still thinking about meetings?

Here is an article from HBR on how to conduct a meeting. They don’t have a nifty, colorful agenda like we do… but they do have some great advice. Read more here.

💸 There is a new stimulus bill, maybe you heard of it?  