This book shows how meetings can become energizing, enjoyable places where concrete plans are made, tasks are accomplished, connections are strengthened, and projects move forward.

• Powerful promise: This book shows how meetings can become energizing, enjoyable places where concrete plans are made, tasks are accomplished, connections are strengthened, and projects move forward.
• Universal solution: The authors have worked with all kinds of organizations-businesses, nonprofits, universities, governments, and more.

Most people regard meetings as places where productivity goes to die. But in this book, leading consultants Dick and Emily Axelrod share a way to meet that enables you to get work done right there in the meeting, an approach they've spent thirty years field testing. Using the same work-design principles that transformed the mind-numbing assembly line into the dynamic factory floor and make video games so engaging, they offer a flexible, repeatable process that has already been used to run thousands of productive meetings in all kinds of organizations.

The Axelrods show how to design every aspect of a meeting-from the way you greet people at the beginning to how you sum up at the end-so that the experience will be energizing, rather than exhausting, and relevant and helpful to every participant. Dubbed the Meeting Canoe (since, like a canoe, it adapts to changing conditions and is a collective effort), this approach is a seismic shift in the way we view, use, and participate in meetings. The many current users of this system will never go back. Neither will you.