Two executives flipped their board meeting format: instead of 90% presentations and 10% discussion, they made discussion primary, required advance memos, and split speaking time 50/50. The result was shorter, less exhausting, and more efficient than anything they'd tried before.
Chapters
I'll tell you another thing I've been thinking about. None of this is probably on your bingo card. That's fine. I had a board meeting yesterday. They're 2 days long.
We've been doing the same board format for about 100 years.
And it just got a little rote and honestly, I get a little bored in the board meetings. And I think a lot of the board members did. So I was having like conversations with some board members and some people started complaining about us. You're right. They're like, we need to rethink it. And so we changed the format up on this recent board meeting and we have the best board meeting we've ever had. And the changes were very simple. Typically the board meetings are 90% main course, 10% side dish. And the main course is the presentation from the executives overseeing a certain part of the business. And the side course—
The classic format, right? Goals, diff, the whole thing. Yeah.
And the side course—
Every leader.
Discussion of the topic du jour. And oftentimes around that time, you never even get to the side course. Let's switch that and let's try to make the side course the main course and the main course the side course. So we made a very simple search, a lot that people have done. We said, just write a memo with any data you have, put it in the memo. We'll read it. Great. I said, I want 50% of the words to be out of the board's mouth and 50% of the words out of my mouth. Anyway, we put those Jason M. Lemkin— it was really good. And normally you run like way over and we skip lunch and we skip the breaks and no one goes to the bathroom. Like we finished early and we covered everything.
