Ok, it was quite a reading weekend and finished the second book by Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting. I had very high expectations from the book given the earlier book I read from the same author was really good and concise.

Unlike "Five temptations by CEO", this book was a big drag even to an extent that I would consider skipping the whole book and just read 20 pages from page 226 onwards where the whole story is summarized. Here is a quick summary: 

Problem#1: Meetings are boring because they lack conflict or drama. Start of meetings should jolt the participants and encourage them to actively engage in healthy discussion and debate. Leaders in meeting should actively mine for issues where there is a disagreement amongst team members and then help in coming to a resolution making meetings interesting and fruitful.

Problem#2: Meetings are ineffective because they lack context. There should be different meeting for different purpose rather then trying to accomplish different objectives in a single meeting. Author suggests 4 different type of meetings for different purposes as summarized in the picture attached. 

Overall, there are some good ideas in the book to make meetings effective & useful but I don't agree with 4 meeting format as it would vary from company to company based on size and team dynamics. 

Looking forward to reading "Rework" by 37signals founders and comparing their stance on meetings with this book. 

 

From time to time, we order books from Amazon based on recommendations from all the team members at Confiz. Batch of 14 books arrived on Friday that includes lot of business, strategy and some technical books. 

I just finished "The Five Temptations of a CEO" by Patrick Lencioni. I must admit that the book is really good and short, nicely written in a form of a tale which is quite different approach then other business books that become boring to read after a while. 

Almost 140 pages and took me 2 hours to finish it and some quick lessons are recapped below

Temptation #1: Choosing status over results, we are all guilty at time of protecting our personal status and working for it rather then actually caring about the results of the company. We should be driven by results and not our personal status. 

Temptation #2: Choosing to not hold people accountable to avoid becoming unpopular, we should make sure that we hold people accountable for results as that determines the success of the company rather then avoiding confrontation for sake of keeping everyone happy

Temptation#3: Choosing to wait too long to take decisions for the sake of correctness. We all need to take decisions and make deliverables clear for everyone so that we can hold people & ourselves accountable.

Temptation#4: Choosing harmony over healthy conflict. In order to make decisions with a fair degree of accuracy, it's important we involve people around/direct reports in healthy discussion rather then no discussion for the sake of maintaining harmony. 

Temptation#5: Choosing invulnerability over trust. In order for people to be able to present their ideas with confidence they need to trust us and that requires winning their trust in the first place which can at times mean being vulnerable to them. 

Go ahead and order a copy for yourself and enjoy reading !  

 

After my last post, seems like major banks realized that they are seriously bugging their valuable customers and have taken corrective action. I have so far received letters from UBL (attached) & Standard Charted Bank notifying me that they will respect my choice to not hear about every random product that they launch and will not call me and so far they haven't.

Now all the other companies, especially "Harvest Investment Group" (anyone else suffering too from them ? ) needs to realize that every time they call me to introduce their investment offerings, I am getting more and more agitated and will never even consider them as an option, so STOP calling me.

Image scanned with iphone application named DocScanner

I am sick and tired of receiving calls from banks (not exactly banks but their outsourced call centers companies) offering co-branded cards, free loan facility, health insurance and laundry services or whatever these banks can think of ... just because I have a good credit history and I pay my bills on time, I would be disturbed the most by these banks ? Should I stop paying my bills to get rid of these calls ?

 And the irony is that I have asked zillion times not to call me for these offers but it never stops ... why would it ? There is a huge conflict of interest. Banks have outsourced these operations to some cheap call centers who are paid on conversions and not customer satisfaction so they will call bank customers to the death to get these offers so that they can make money where as banks are just looking at top level numbers and not customer satisfaction. I just hope some banker out there reading this has the sanity to fix this, believe me you will have me customer for life !!

Btw is there any "Do Not Call Me" list in Pakistan ?

Ok, I have finally decided to setup my blog and write all the random thoughts moving in my head. This is the first email I am sending to posterous to setup my account.