Harvard Business Review articles on meetings

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HBR regularly features articles on meetings: Meetings - HBR

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Any specific article you can recommend?

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A few of the HBR authors also write for us, and I can testify that they do not have a particularly scientific bent. :slight_smile: Of the folks writing on meetings specifically, I like Roger Schwarz’s stuff. HBR makes a great reference source for much of our writing, but I find I link more often to the studies on decision making, strategic planning methodologies, and other topics than I do to the meeting-specific stuff.
IMO, the challenge with the HBR articles is most do not deal with meeting context - what kind of a meeting they are talking about - which leads to problematic oversimplifications.

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I’d say there is one seminal article on business meetings, see attached.Jay_HBR_How to run a meeting.pdf (1.4 MB)
A more recent one that was actually published in the magazine (i.e., not a blog post) is this one about the ripple effect of meetings (I think Elise looked at this one in her research as well):

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Another article in the July-August HBR Magazine, mostly about using time effectively:

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As true as some of the observations in this text are, I’m afraid it’s another one of these pseudo-scientific articles that boil down to: yes, we need to take a more conscious approach to whether and how we conduct meetings. But when it comes to distinguishing facts established by academic research and what I like to call “guru knowledge”, the article fails, especially in the beginning, when it suggests that there is plenty of evidence for both how much time we spend in meetings and how this has developed over time, when there clearly isn’t.

Towards the end, it gets better, when they provide some anecdotal evidence (and clearly describe it as such) about how various organizations have changed their meeting practices.

Does someone know any of the authors? Please invite them to share more background information about their study. I suppose they would agree that systematic data about meetings is still thin and perhaps we can have a discussion about what we know, what we think we know, and what we don’t know about meetings?