The Surprising Science of Meetings

How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance

By: Dr. Steven G. Rogelberg

Narrated by: L.J. Ganser

A recent estimate suggests that employees endure a staggering 55 million meetings a day in the United States. This tremendous time investment yields only modest returns. No organization made up of human beings is immune from the all-too-common meeting gripes: those that fail to engage, those that inadvertently encourage participants to tune out, and those that blatantly disregard participants' time.

Most companies and leaders view poor meetings as an inevitable cost of doing business. But managers can take heart: Researchers now have a clear understanding of the key drivers that make meetings successful. In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven G. Rogelberg, researcher and consultant to some of the world's most successful companies, draws from extensive research, analytics and data mining, and survey interviews with over 5,000 employees across a range of industries to share the proven practices and techniques that help managers and employees enhance the quality of their meetings. For those who lead and participate in meetings, Rogelberg provides immediate direction, guidance, and relief, offering a how-to guide to change your working life starting today.

©2019 Steven G. Rogelberg (P)2019 Gildan Media

Helpful, accessible, high-quality tips

Great book for two reasons: (1) the suggestions are well-organized to make them easy to find and implement, and (2) the suggestions are based in actual research findings! I'd strongly recommend buying the physical copy of the book for the tools at the end (and to more easily peruse each chapter's takeaways), but I enjoyed listening to the audiobook as a way to get a good overview of the science-based recommendations offered. Dr. Rogelberg has thought through all different types of meetings, including teleconferences and walking meetings, and I think everyone who has to run a meeting will find something of use here.

No PDF download for supplements

Let’s be honest, if you are listening to this book you want a bullet list of items to do to make your meetings more effective. You also want to refer to the graphs and charts that are mentioned in the book. Rather buy the book than the audible if you need this - the audible version doesn’t come with any of this.

Other than that it is a pretty good book

So-so content

Material is helpful, but it could've been presented in a much more concise manner. It's too wordy and I found myself getting bored and thinking.....get to the point. The thing that I DID NOT LIKE is that the PDF's for the forms and assessments that the author references in the hard copy are not available for download. If I knew that ahead of time i probably would not have bought this on audible.

Written for a pre pandemic world!

The author gives some very good information in this book. In fact I wish I had read it years ago. But too many of the technics are based on in person meetings with all participants sitting in one room around a conference table. This is a thing of the past for my team. The author does include one short section regarding video meetings but not much innovative thinking is offered in that section. In fact, the author comes across as inexperience in the online meeting world. But it’s a good book if we ever get back to running meetings around a conference table like we used to. A good read that time has passed by already.

Must Read

I found this book to be very eye-opening. never realized how much time we spend in meetings and how we need to improve them.