Dick and Emily know that meetings are cultural snapshots of your organization. These snapshots tell you all you need to know about power, authority, decision-making, communication patterns, and the way people relate to each other in your organization.

In this workshop, Dick and Emily will teach you how to use your culture snapshots in conjunction with The Meeting Canoe System™ for creating productive meetings. By applying what you learn, you will be able to create productive, engaging meetings that shift your organization’s culture.

Please join us on November 20, 2015 for an engaging learning experience. Oh yes, please bring with you snapshots of meetings in your organization.
 
When:
November 20th, 9:00am – 5:00pm
Where:
Sonoma State University / Santa Rosa, California
Fee:
$495.00 per person; includes an autographed copy of Let’s Stop Meeting Like This: Tools to Save Time and Get More Done
PAY TO REGISTER NOW
 
Questions? Contact us!

Marv Weisbord and Sandra Janoff have done it again. In Lead More, Control Less they have distilled a lifetime of work into an extremely practical and accessible book. Weisbord and Janoff have identified eight essential leadership skills that work. They are:

1. Control Structure, Not People
2. Let Everyone Be Responsible
3. Consider Anxiety "Blocked Excitement"
4. Avoid "Taking it Personally"
5. Disrupt Fight or Flight
6. Include the Right People
7. Experience the "Whole Elephant"
8. Surface Unspoken Agreements

These skills are critical skills when it comes to leading organizational change. If you are a leader or someone who works with leaders, this book is the only guide you need. Don’t start your journey without it.

Everyone knows that working with people who are different than you can lead to better results. The question is how. In The Genius of Opposites, best-selling author Jennifer Kahnweiler provides the answer. Tackling the issue of how introverts and extroverts can work together, Jennifer provides us with a five-step process that helps introverts and extroverts understand and appreciate each other’s wiring, use conflicts to spur creativity, enrich their own skills by learning from each other, and see and act on things neither would have separately. We love this book not just because Emily and I are examples Jennifer uses, but because it is chock-full of practical tips everyone can use when people work and think in ways that are alien to you.

We've found three big ways to make meetings more enjoyable and productive. You can thank us later.

By Stephanie Vozza | FastCompany.com

Insights from a new book [Let's Stop Meeting Like This by Dick and Emily Axelrod] can help you assess if your meetings are broken--and provide you with proper techniques to fix them.

By Ilan Mochari | INC.com

The couple share their secret for how to actually get work done the next time you gather your team together.

by Theodore Kinni | strategy+business

The knee-jerk response to these statistics is to eliminate unnecessary meetings. (HBR Meeting Decision Tree) We agree that makes sense. But if that is all you do, all you have is fewer bad meetings. The next step is to improve meeting quality in the remaining meetings. That’s where we come in.

We offer a variety of services to organizations seeking to "Save Time and Get More Done" in meetings: in-house webinars, meeting clinics, workshops, train-the-trainer programs, and our forthcoming e-learning program. All based on our book, Let’s Stop Meeting Like This. Contact us at 847.251.7361 or info@axelrodgroup.com to discuss how to improve meetings in your organization. We are a click away or as close as your phone.

How can you run a great meeting that is engaging for participants, productive, and a great investment of everyone’s time?

By Kevin Kruse | Forbes.com

Did you ever finish a book and then start reading it again because it was so good? That is David Brooks' latest book, The Road to Character. Extremely well written and researched, The Road to Character provides inspiration as you experience the crucible that forms character.

As someone who works with leaders and teaches leadership, this book is far above the thin gruel served up in the popular business press. Brooks examines the character of leaders across time and culture from Augustine to Eisenhower, from A. Philip Randolph to Samuel Johnson, from Francis Perkins to George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans). All are flawed. All achieve greatness. In a time when we desperately need character, The Road to Character provides inspiration. Here are David Brooks' own words as to why he wrote The Road to Character: "We live in a culture that focuses on external success. We live in a fast, distracted culture. We’ve lost some of the vocabulary other generations had to describe the inner confrontation with weakness that produces good character. I am hoping this book can help people better understand their own lives, their own moral adventures, and their own roads to character."

At the end of The Road to Character, Brooks provides us with what he calls the Humility Code: "a coherent image of what to live for and how to live."

1. We don’t live for happiness; we live for holiness.
2. Proposition one defines the goal of life.
3. Although we are flawed creatures, we are splendidly endowed.
4. In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue.
5. Pride is the central vice.
6. Once the necessities for survival are satisfied, the struggle against sin and for virtue is the central drama of life.
7. Character is a set of dispositions, desires, and habits that are slowly engraved during the stuggle against your own weakness.
8. The things that lead us astray are short terms—lust, fear, vanity, gluttony.
9. NO person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own.
10. We are all ultimately saved by grace.
11. Defeating weakness often means quieting the self.
12. Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty.
13. No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation.
14. The best leader tries to lead along the grain of human nature rather than go against it.
15. The person who successfully struggles against weakness and sin may or may not become rich and famous, but that person will become mature.

David Brooks set out to learn something about character by writing about character. The result is a book filled with extraordinary wisdom.

by Elise Keith of Lucid Meetings

If usable meeting know-how is a problem in your organization, follow these practical steps to go beyond the basics and learn what works for the kinds of meetings you run.

1. Read a book.
Advice on the internet can point you in the right direction, but you’ll need to go a bit deeper before you can put it into practice. There are lots of books on running effective meetings, many of which are breezy reads. Right now, I’m particularly fond of Dick & Emily Axelrod’s quick-reading book Let’s Stop Meeting Like This. Their “meeting canoe” framework provides a solid foundation for building all kinds of useful agendas. Good stuff.