• 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.