This excerpt is an anecdote by the speaker (Jason M. Lemkin) about redesigning his company’s two-day board meeting. He describes the traditional format (executive presentations as the 'main course' and brief discussions as the 'side dish'), the boredom it caused, and a simple change: require written memos and make discussion the primary activity, which led to a much better, more efficient meeting.
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I'll tell you another thing I've been thinking about. None of this is probably on your bingo card. Had a home board meeting yesterday. It's. They're two days long. We've been doing the same board format for about a hundred 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. 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. Yeah. And the side course, classic format. Right. Goals, diff the whole. Yeah. In the side course, every leader, discussion of the topic du jour. And oftentimes around that time, you never even did the side course. Let's switch that and let's try to make the side course the main course and main course, the site course. So if we made a very simple search, a lot that people have done, we said, just write a memo. 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 of M. Anyway, we put those. Jason Bus. It was really good. And normally you run, like, way over and we skip lunch, we skip the breaks, and then we go to the bathroom. Like, we finished early and we covered everything.