Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions

By John E. Tropman

Book Overview

A best-seller in its first edition, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition covers everything you need to know about organizing engaging meetings, including preparing agendas, controlling what happens behind the scenes prior to and after meetings, and managing conflicting values and personalities. Through the Meeting Masters Research Project at the University of Michigan, author John E. Tropman observed and interviewed the nation′s most successful meeting experts to find out how to make meetings both stimulating and productive. Based on his findings, Tropman formulated seven principles and fourteen commandments for implementing dynamic meetings.

This second edition has been extensively revised and expanded to include

Family meetings and family group decision making Problems and solutions for board of directors meetings Community and civic meetings Volunteers and meetings Leadership in community decision making

Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition

provides simple, easily applied best practices for supervising or instigating meetings with decision accomplishment outcomes. Author John E. Tropman reveals goal oriented procedures that keep proposals moving towards quality group decision making and assure other participants look forward to attending your meetings.

Written with humor and a deep understanding of the realities of business and political life, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition is an extraordinary resource for anyone who leads, facilitates, or attends meetings.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0761927050
• ISBN13: 9780761927051
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Buy this book and help stop the pain of bad meetings!

It is amazing what the real cost of meetings are. I'm not just talking about the aggregate cost to the business of the attendees salaries. What about the opportunity cost of the inability of a group to form a decision, let alone a good one? It is within this context that John Tropman describes how to effectively and efficiently manage meetings. Mind you, this is not a book devoted to anecdotes and examples of bad meetings. No, this little gem delivers step-by-step instructions for creating a setting in which successful decisions are made. For example, most people will acknowledge the necessity of having an agenda, but have you thought about how topics should be structured within the agenda to enable quality decisions? When isn't the democratic ideal of one person, one vote a good approach to settle an issue? I was able to immediately use many of the items outlined in this book to improve meetings that I chair. On the negative side, Part V, which is new with the second edition, seemed tacked on and out of place with the rest of the book. A minor point perhaps, but the last few pages were somewhat of a let down when compared to the first part. However, don't let that stop you from buying this book and ending the scourge of bad meetings

Insightful and Useful

I found useful information on every page of this book. Modern business is round after round of meetings. There are too many meetings and far too few that are really useful. Dr. Tropman helps us focus on when and why and HOW to have meetings. He also gives us tools to decide what goes into the meeting and what to leave out. Having wasted too many days of my life in these modern torture cells, this book came as a breath of fresh are. It is not only useful, it is a delight to read and implement.