Face it… most meetings are a waste of time. 
We at The Social Syndicate enjoyed Dr. Rick Brinkman’s entertaining writing style on a subject that scores of business books have been authored on. The oldest is a classic, “Robert’s Rules of Order,” that was first published in 1876 and is now in it’s 11th edition. Is there anything new under the sun on the subject of meetings?
The answer is: Yes, and “Dealing with Meetings You Can’t Stand” offers a new twist on a tired subject. Don’t get me started on presentation books… Dr. Brinkman cleverly uses aviation metaphors to engage us much like a good movie on a long flight. I especially enjoyed Chapter 13 on TSA: How the Process Prevents the Problem Behaviors. I have been in some meetings where I have felt that there is a screaming baby on board and there is no exit.
We have all felt the pain of “Death by PowerPoint.” I have personally suffered through thousands of inane and soporific meetings where time is like a melting clock in a Salvador Dali painting and the uncomfortable and monotone presenter just blathers on. Jetlag is inevitable post-meeting to continue the flight metaphor of this book.
The end goal of any meeting should be to edify, inform, entertain and most of all move the business forward, yet so few do.
Dr. Brinkman concludes on an uplifting spiritual and fascinating personal story of how this book made it to market and hopefully into your hands. I won’t spoil it for you, but it involves the survival story of his parents in a concentration camp and Viktor E. Frankl’s message that:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Life is precious, don’t waste them in senseless meetings, and if you’re forced to suffer through them, try to be an agent of change.