Making Meetings Matter: How Smart Leaders Orchestrate Powerful Conversations in the Digital Age

It is common to feel that corporate meetings are a waste of time. Time that could be better spent getting “real work” done. But it doesn’t have to be that way. This book is dedicated to the proposition that meetings can be meaningful, productive, and even fun—all at the same time. We need to bring business meetings into the digital age in the same way that we have reinvented business planning and written communication. In a technology-rich world filled with people working flexibly, remotely, and across multiple time zones, the way we lead meetings is out of alignment with 21st-century organizational reality. This book is all about reinventing the business meeting. It offers advice and guidance for streamlining and strengthening all kinds of corporate conversations; but it focuses where it should, on the formal meetings that fill up over 50 percent of most managers’ calendars.

James Ware, PhD, is meeting design strategist. He is a former Harvard Business School professor who has invested his entire career in understanding what organizations must do to thrive in a rapidly changing world. His business wisdom comes from deep academic knowledge and over thirty years of hands-on experience as a senior executive and a change leader driving corporate innovation. All that work in the trenches taught him how critical meetings are to organizational success and how rare it is for them to be productive, let alone popular.

Today Jim works with professionals like you to turn those dull, boring meetings into highly engaging conversations. A passionate meeting design strategist, he has distilled decades of personal learning into an essential set of "new rules" for designing and leading meetings that matter. He lives and works in northern California.