Where the Action Is

• "10 Proactive Questions Every Board Member Should Be Asking," Andrew White, Tazim Essani, and Eric Wilkinson (2021)
• "11 Myths About Decision Making", Cheryl Strauss Einhorn (2021)
• A Better Approach to After-Action Reviews, Angus Fletcher, Preston B. Cline, and Matthew Hoffman (2023)
• Reid Hoffman's Rituals of Great Board Meetings: The 8 Strategic Tools Used by Top Companies on Coda
• When Surprise Is a Good Negotiation Tactic by Roi Ben-Yehuda and Tania Luna for Harvard Business Review
• One-on-ones are my most valuable meetings; here’s how I run them by Mathilde Collin for The Startup

Introduction

• "A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making", David J. Snowden, Mary E. Boone (2007).
• "Cold Offices Linked to Lower Productivity", APS: Association for Psychological Science (2015).
• "The robots-vs.-robots trading that has hijacked the stock market", Steven Pearlstein (2018).
• (GTD) Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. David Allen (2002).
• Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Robert Sapolsky (2017).
• How to make meetings work: The new interaction method. Michael Doyle (1976).
• Influence: Science and Practice. Robert Cialdini (1984).
• Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised (11th Edition). Henry M. Robert III (Original Author), Daniel H. Honemann (Author), Thomas J. Balch (Author). (1915-2011).
• The Meeting. Gatherings in Organizations and Communities. Schwartzman, Helen B. (1989).
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business. Gino Wickman (2012).
• Agile Manifesto
• Beatrice Briggs, Paul Axtell, and more, Lucid Meetings (2018).
• CMM: Capability Maturity Model. CMM Institute.
• ISO 9001 Quality Management Standards. ISO.
• KPIs: Key Performance Indicators. KPI.
• Lean
• PMI: Project Management Institute. ISO.
• Reading List: Better Meetings, Better Business. Elise Keith (2018).
• SCRUM. Scrum Alliance.

1. The Bad Meetings Doom Loop

• "You Waste a Lot of Time at Work". Atlassian.
• A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to the Power of Beliefs in Business. Ari Weinzweig (2016).
• Liminal Thinking. Dave Gray (2016).

2. The Truth About Why We Meet

• "Metcalfe's law", Multiple (circa 1980).
• "Organic. Big results from small seeds.", Organic Trade Association.
• "The Science and Fiction of Meetings", Steven G. Rogelberg, Cliff Scott and John Kello (2007).
• "55 Million: A Fresh Look at the Number, Effectiveness, and Cost of Meetings in the U.S.", Elise Keith (2015).
• "Predictions for what robots will do to the US workforce, ranked from certain doom to potential utopia", Sarah Kessler (2017).
• "Tuesday’s Master Facilitation Tip: Preparing", Michael Wilkinson (2015).
• Meetings Suck: Turning One of The Most Loathed Elements of Business into One of the Most Valuable. Cameron Herold (2016).
• "2017 Gartner Symposium: Gartner Analyst Opening Keynote: Creating Digital Value at Scale", Gartner (2017).
• The Blind Men and the Elephant. John G. Saxe (read by Tom O'Bedlam (2010).

3. The Perverse Psychology of Meetings

• "Can You Keep Your Meeting to Five Minutes?", Sue Shellenbarger (2017).
• "Stewart Butterfield of Slack: Is Empathy on Your Résumé?", Adam Bryant (2015).
• "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule", Paul Graham (2009).
• Meetings, Manners, and Civilization: The Development of Modern Meeting Behaviour. Wilbert Van Vree (1999).
• "United States Constitution Amendment 1", United States Government (1791).
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 20, United Nations General Assembly (1948).
• Reichstag Fire Decree, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

6. Functional Meeting Structure

• "Take a moment so that the soul can arrive", Beatrice Briggs.
• Let's Stop Meeting Like This: Tools to Save Time and Get More Done. Dick and Emily Axelrod (2014).
• Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool (2011).
• Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. Amy Cuddy (2015).
• Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights. Gary Klein (2013).
• The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science. Edited by Joseph A. Allen, University of Nebraska, Omaha , Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam , Steven G. Rogelberg, University of North Carolina, Charlotte (2015).
• The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Coaches, and Trainers (3rd edition). Roger Schwarz (2016).
• The Surprising Power of Liberating Structure. Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless (2014).
• "Mindful multitasking: Meditation first can calm stress, aid concentration", Peter Kelley (2012).
• "The effects of facilitator characteristics on meeting preparation, set up and implementation". Niederman, F., & Volkema, R. J. (1999).
• The Power of the Mindful Minute at Work. Birju Pandya.
• Multitasking: Switching costs. American Psychological Association (2006).

7. Pumping Up Perceived Meeting Quality

• "Up to 27 Seconds of Inattention After Talking to Your Car or Smartphone", David Strayer, Joel Cooper, Lee Siegel (2015).
• "The Real-Time Agenda Technique", Elise Keith (2018).
• Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business. Patrick Lencioni (2004).
• "Meeting Design Characteristics and Attendee Perceptions of Staff/Team Meeting Quality", Cohen, Melissa A.,Rogelberg, Steven G.,Allen, Joseph A.,Luong, Alexandra (2011).
• "Meeting Preparation and Design Characteristics", Odermatt, König, Kleinmann (2015).
• "Perceived Meeting Effectiveness: The Role of Design Characteristics", Desmond J. Leach, Steven G. Rogelberg, Peter B. Warr, Jennifer L. Burnfield (2009).
• Email Overload: Research and Statistics.
• Lean Coffee.
• Open Space Technology.

8. The Spectrum of Meeting Engagement

• What is the optimal group size for decision-making?. Sheila Margolis (2011).

9. Designing for Net Positive Impact

• "'Infomania' worse than marijuana", BBC News (2005).
• "Brain Interrupted", Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson (2010).
• "It’s the leading edge of sustainability, but we’ve not cracked it", Oliver Bach (2015).
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Cal Newport (2017).
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2008).
• Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less—and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined. Scott Sonenshein (2017).
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Daniel Pink (2011).
• "Employee satisfaction with meetings: A contemporary facet of job satisfaction.", Rogelberg, S. G., Allen, J. A., Shanock, L. , Scott, C. and Shuffler, M. (2010).
• "Manager-Led Group Meetings A Context for Promoting Employee Engagement", Allen, J.A., Rogelberg, S.G. (2013).
• "The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress." Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke (2008).
• Flow, the secret to happiness. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2004).
• Information Overload Research Group.
• Kunsido.

11. The Meeting Performance Maturity Model

• "Billionaire Ray Dalio: 12 steps you can follow to run better meetings", Zameena Mejia (2017).
• "How a Single Mom Created a Plastic Food-Storage Empire", Jen Doll (2017).
• "Intel Knows Meetings". Maxine Attong (2011).
• Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. Esther Derby, Diana Larsen (2006).
• People Capability Maturity Model® (P-CMM®) Version 2.0. CMM Institute (2010).
• Principles. Ray Dalio (2017).
• How to build a company where the best ideas win. Ray Dalio (2017).
• Bridgewater Associates.
• "Tupperware History: Brownie Wise." Tupperware.
• Zingerman's.

12. Zingerman’s: A Profile of High Performance

• Kata. Lean Enterprise Institute.

14. Seizing Cultural Ownership

• "What A Dog And A Monkey Taught Me About Management At Google", Tomasz Tunguz (2013).
• Democracy in the Making: How Activist Groups Form. Kathleen Blee (2012).
• Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. Robert Cialdini (2016).
• The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book). Don Miguel Ruiz (1997).
• Ministerial Panel on Child Intervention archive. Government of Alberta (2018).
• Historical Vignette 038 - An Army Engineer Brought Order to Church Meetings. U.S. Army Corp of Engineers.

18. Progress Checks

• "7 Ways to Write Better Action Items", Charlie Gilkey (2012).
• Facilitating the Project Lifecycle: The Skills & Tools to Accelerate Progress for Project Managers, Facilitators, and Six Sigma Project Teams. Janet A. Means, Tammy Adams (2005).
• High Output Management. Andy Grove (1983).
• The Project Meeting Facilitator: Facilitation Skills to Make the Most of Project Meetings. Janet A. Means, Tammy Adams, Michael Spivey (2007).

19. One-on-Ones

• 25 Questions to Ask in One-on-One Meetings by Elise Keith for Inc.
• Cisco Studied More Than 15,000 Teams and Found One Simple Practice Consistently Improves Engagement by Elise Keith for Inc.
• "7 ways to prepare for an effective one-on-one meeting with your manager", (2018) Claire Lew
• "A Good Place to Work", Ben Horowitz (2012).
• "One-on-One", Ben Horowitz (2012).
• "The 4 questions you should stop asking during your one-on-one meetings", (2018) Claire Lew
• Meetings Matter: 8 Powerful Strategies for Remarkable Conversations. Paul Axtell (2015).
• Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders. Jennifer Garvey Berger, Keith Johnston (2016).

20. Action Reviews

• "Learning from Success and Failure", Bob Sutton (2007).
• "Learning in the Thick of It", Marilyn Darling, Charles Parry, Joseph Moore (2005).
• "Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitation Guide for Blameless Postmortems", John Allspaw (2016).
• Podcast: This is Retrospective Facilitation hosted by Enrico Teotti
• Awesome Retrospectives, a GitHub repository of resources
• Wildland Fire Leadership Council AAR Resources.

21. Governance Cadence Meetings

• "Making great decisions," Chip Heath, Olivier Sibony (2013).
• "The Impact of Stress", Steve Bressert, Ph.D. (2016).
• "The Secret to Making Board Meetings Suck Less," Jeff Bonforte.
• Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised, 11th Edition, by Henry M. Robert III, Daniel H. Honemann, Thomas J. Balch, et al.
• The Board Book: An Insider's Guide for Directors and Trustees. William G. Bowen (2012).
• Special Districts: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. HBO (2016).

22. The Catalyst Meetings

• Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging and Enjoyable Meetings. Mamie Kanfer Stewart, Tai Tsao (2017).

23. Idea Generation Meetings

• "Research: For Better Brainstorming, Tell an Embarrassing Story", Leigh Thompson (2017).
• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques. Michael Michalko (2006).

24. Planning Meetings

• "Plans Are Worthless, But Planning Is Everything: Dwight D. Eisenhower? Winston Churchill? Richard M. Nixon? Anonymous?", Garson O’Toole (2017).
• "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy", Sean Newman Maroni (2015).
• "No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers – Business Plans versus Business Models", Steve Blank (2010).

25. Problem Solving Meetings

• "The five keys to a successful Google team", Julia Rozovsky (2015).
• Building a psychologically safe workplace. Amy Edmondson (2014).
• Dr. Daniel Siegel’s Hand Model of the Brain. Danie Siegel (2012).

26. Decision Making Meetings

• "New Research: Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making At Work", Eric Larson (2017).
• "The Decision-Driven Organization", Marcia W. Blenko, Michael Mankins,Paul Rogers (2010).
• "Battle Axes to Boardrooms: A Discussion with Wilbert Van Vree". Elise Keith (2018).
• Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. Chip and Dan Heath (2013).
• The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. Peter Drucker (1966).
• Your Logical Fallacy Is. Gabriel Weinberg.

29. Sensemaking Meetings

• "Is this really an "ancient Chinese proverb"?". Metafilter (2013).
• The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. Sam Kaner (2014).
• The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Steven Sloman, Philip Ferbach (2017).
• SENSEMAKING Framing and Acting in the Unknown Deborah Ancona, MIT-Sloan School of Management

30. Introductions

• "The Secret to a Really Good Interview Is Simply Knowing When to Shut Your Mouth", Richard Moy.
• "Tooling Up: First Impressions—Are Interview Results Preordained?, David G. Jensen (2004).
• Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. Broadway Books (2013).
• "The Influence of Handshakes on First Impression Accuracy", Frank J. Bernieri, Kristen N Petty (2011).

32. Community of Practice Meetings

• "Effective safety committees", Thomas J. Bukowski (2014).
• "Developmental sequence in small groups", Bruce Tuckman (1965).
• Meetup.

33. Training Meetings

• "Essential Guide to Staff Training", Maggie Bayless (2014).
• "Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece Its Meaning for Today, Correspondence, Vol. 2, No. 12.", C.L. James (1956).
• "Four stages of competence", Wikipedia.
• "The Protégé Effect: Why teaching someone else is the best way to learn", Annie Murphy Paul (2012).
• Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels. Donald L. and James D Kirkpatrick (1996).
• Zingerman's Guide to Good Leading, Part 2: A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Being a Better Leader. Ari Weinzweig (2012).
• "Dimensions and psychology of peer teaching in medical education", Olle Ten Cate & Steven Durning (2009).
• "Reciprocal peer teaching: Students teaching students in the gross anatomy laboratory", Krych, A. J., March, C. N., Bryan, R. E., Peake, B. J., Pawlina, W. and Carmichael, S. W (2005).

34. Broadcast Meetings

• "How SoundCloud Keeps Communication Flowing Across 4 Offices in 4 Time Zones", First Round Review.

35. From Meetings to Meeting Flows

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. Ben Horowitz (2014).
• "A public sphere in Amazonia? the depersonalized collaborative construction of discourse in Xavante", Laura Graham (1993).