Patrick Lencioni's "Death by Meeting" employs a leadership fable to examine transforming unproductive meetings into engaging and effective sessions.

The book identifies the main issues as a lack of drama and an absence of contextual structure. Lencioni advocates for infusing conflict and emotion into meetings to spark engagement.

He also suggests categorizing meetings by purpose: Daily Check-ins for brief updates, Weekly Tacticals for short-term issue resolution, Monthly Strategics for critical discussions, and Quarterly Off-Site Reviews for long-term reflection.

The aim is to eliminate "meeting stew," where diverse topics are combined without focus, leading to wasted time. The text implies that while seemingly increasing meeting frequency, this structured approach saves time by reducing "sneaker time" spent clarifying decisions.