Meeting Excellence: 33 Tools to Lead Meetings that Get Results.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Brief article - Book review

Meeting Excellence: 33 Tools to Lead Meetings that Get Results. By Glenn Parker and Robert Hoffman. Jossey-Bass, 216 pages. $22.95.

Meetings are the bane of many managers' lives. They drone on, sapping time and energy, and far too often, not enough gets accomplished. No wonder they're perfect fodder for comic strips like "Dilbert."

Glenn Parker and Robert Hoffman want to send out a life raft for those drowning in meetings--and more importantly, for those who set them up and run them. The book's title is really a misnomer: the "tools" are short chapters addressing the wide range of issues that meeting planners encounter. "Tools" must have sounded like a more compelling word to the publisher than "ideas."

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No matter. Parker, a New Jersey-based consultant, and Hoffman, an executive with Novartis, developed the book from a project at Novartis aimed at making meetings more productive. They tackle such...