Next Level Blog

How to Run a Staff Meeting

There’s an interesting video on the New York Times web site that offers a peek inside the daily staff meeting of the team responsible for cleaning up the Gulf oil spill. It’s about three minutes long and is worth a look if you want to see how an efficient staff meeting is run.

I’ve watched it a few times and have concluded that while it probably wasn’t intentional the meeting format could have been based on the old journalism school formula for writing a news story – Who, What, When, Where, Why, How.

Here are some examples of what I mean by that. See if you agree with me that it’s a pretty good way to run a staff meeting.

Video Book Club: A Sense of Urgency

If you’re moving too fast to read this post, then you probably need to take a minute and a half to watch this week’s Video Book Club clip on John Kotter’s A Sense of Urgency. In the clip, I mention his distinction between real urgency and false urgency. I also share my big take away from the book not it’s not just about the facts, it’s about something else.

Three Lessons from the Longest Serving Senator

Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia died in the early morning hours of Monday. As reported by Adam Clymer in the New York Times, he was 92 and served 51 years in the U.S. Senate following six years in the House of Representatives. That made him the longest serving member of Congress ever.

I grew up in West Virginia, worked for one of its governors and am a student of politics so I watched Senator Byrd in action for most of my life. Some of us with ties to the state call it Byrdland because it seems like every other building or road is the Senator Robert C. Byrd something or other. Much to the chagrin of many but to the delight of most West Virginians, Byrd channeled over a billion dollars in federal projects to the state when he was chairman of the Senate Appropriations committee.

Like all of the rest of us human beings, Byrd wasn’t perfect. As a young man, he joined and then quit the Ku Klux Klan (and, as Clymer notes in his article, spent years apologizing for and regretting his membership). He became a consistent supporter of civil rights legislation only in the last half of his career.  He certainly had an ego as all of those buildings and roads with his name on them will attest. That said, in reading the Byrd obituaries this morning, there are three lessons from his life that I think leaders should consider:

Who’s The Boss?

If you haven’t read the full Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal, it’s worth 15 minutes of your time to do so. The RS reporter, Michael Hastings, had pretty much unfettered access to McChrystal and his top aides over the course of a month in Paris and Afghanistan. The result of that is an engrossing article that includes a number of intemperate remarks from the General and his aides which have endangered McChrystal’s career. I took some time to read the article online yesterday and was struck by something that I haven’t seen discussed in the secondary reporting.

Video Book Club: The Discipline of Market Leaders

One of the things that makes a strategy book really useful is when it introduces a model that you can use to organize your thinking for years to come. This week’s VBC feature did that for me. It’s The Discipline of Market Leaders. In this video clip, I share and show my big take away from the book and how it might help you think about executing strategy.