How business automation, workflows & data flow is helping our team SLAY MEETINGS – the Ultimate Time Vampire

[Editor's note: we use these articles to on-board our team members on our new platform, one use case at a time. It shows them exactly how the business automation and improved data flow will save them time & money with this experimental tech.

The tech reduces information asymmetry, favors collaboration and is designed to amplify their core genius*.

We update the article regularly (Thu 15 Oct) to reflect the most recent features we've been experimenting with for this specific use case. New content is marked with a [NEW] tag so you can revisit the article from time to time and always get to the good stufff...]

Meetings are notorious for being a time suck. They can rack up astronomical cost and rarely amount to true progress... or any type of consistent drive forward. Yes, we all know it, meetings tend to suck. And meeting culture has become right down silly. As one of our partners, a brilliant operator and creative, likes to put it:

Our meeting culture is broken. It's like we've become addicted to just throwing bodies at it, as if we'll make a problem go away just by having 17 people talk about it. It's crazy. – S.

Meetings can zap the drive right out of your team. Or worse even, induce soul-crushing apathy and put people in "going-through-the-motions" mode...

Some best practices can help prevent that... at least to some extent. Oliver, a former teammate and highly talented product manager I met in media, when we were both Up to No Good [1] was sharing recently:

When I get a one hour meeting, I ask if it can be 30, if I get a thirty, I ask if I’m required. If I am required I ask if a phone call could answer the question or if a deck could get me up to speed. I’m trying to remove meeting altogether, and found that compressing a meeting usually results with more clarity. I’m trying to lower the bar to 15 minutes and 4 peeps max if possible. – Oli.

We have a similar practice. In January we replaced our daily scrums with 6 min huddles thanks to Scaling Up. Having visibility across the team with huddles saves us about an hour each of back-channeling, every day. That's 4 hours a day we just gained back by taking literally a minute to let our team know what's up in the next 24 hours.

Over and above this type of efficiency, for the sessions you can't eliminate, there are ways to make the time count. Face time can be incredibly precious when done right. The following best practices are no panacea or magic bullet. But they can help...

Things you might already be doing, or most mostly likely heard of, for BEFORE a session:

• Communicate the purpose and agenda in advance.
• Have people prepare for the session and read the material ahead of time.
• Avoid one-way updates / monologues during the meeting [2]. Not a good use of a brain trust. There are a lot of benefits to flowing your intel in advance and letting it sit with your people, so they can connect the dots.
• Share solid facts and distribute robust intelligence [3] around the matters at hand, ahead of time.
• Share issues in advance to enable problem-solvers to contribute at their own pace with modern virtual brain swarming [4] as opposed to outdated brainstorming.

This avoids group-think. It empowers people to deliver their best work without rushing it. It avoids having one or two strong voices monopolize the microphone, which kills most meetings.

Furthermore, there are a few more ways to improve your flow DURING your face time:

• Start on time. Have a productive structure. Stay the course. Finish on time.
• Track the cost of any single meeting in both salaries spent & cost of opportunity
• Be diligent about capturing action items, decisions, insights, issues, etc.
• Ensure everyone engages (using something like a one-word close [5] to cap it off).
• Engage different senses and cater to different personality types or learning styles.
• Schedule the next steps or next session to foster continuity and follow-through.

There are also a number of things you have to do AFTER the session if you want to create a proper follow-through and powerful feedback loops.

• Share the recap, summary or debrief with all attendees automatically and systematically.
• Make the intelligence available to all other stakeholders who didn't attend.
• Provide a recording or transcript.
• Follow up diligently on what came out of that session. If you can't manage to hack everything shared in a handful of smaller useful pieces and flow the data, you might as well never meet in the first place.
• Implement useful and relevant feedback loops & gates so you can build practices that are self organized and continuously self improve .

And the list goes on...

Now, if you've ever put that kind of effort into spending time in person with your people, you know how much work goes into the before, during, and after.

And some of the best practices we share here can certainly help.

But if you don't have any way to further automate or streamline some of it, the work that goes into meetings can become just as much of a time suck.

Chicken wire & duct tape

At our group of agencies, we recently had to run different series of meetings with some of our new partners. We joined forces with a larger team – from our 5th acquisition in 12 months – and had stuff to discuss, solve, align on. That new team was almost three times the size of our prior team.

If you know anything about why 70-90% of mergers and acquisitions fail miserably [6], you have an idea of how much pressure we've been under to get it right. You have to start to Put people first. And the last thing you want to do is bring a new time vampire into the ranks of your new tribe.

If you can't make the new normal more inspiring, more epic and accelerate the growth of your people, you're done for. Period. Full Stop.

There is, however, no such thing as a lightning-fast, 90 days integration plan, with no face time. We do have to find a way to spend some productive time with our new extended family. We're all seasoned executives who could do with less meetings so we made a diligent effort to try and avoid some of the pitfalls that come with them.

We started with a quick & dirty version one by creating a collaborative work doc in Google docs. It allowed us to plan ahead, capture notes and recaps, and such.

It was all right... We used it as a template. We communicated the agenda with it. We captured comments and questions ahead of time. We used it for group notes, a bit. We kept a running list of issues in it. We distributed the main issue at hand ahead of time. It empowered people to put forward their best solution.

Google Docs was able to do most of that... relatively well.

But it's not friction-less. Far from it. It's simply not sustainable in the long run...

On one hand, Google docs rocks for some things but it is not an ideal tool to collect issues. A kanban board like Trello would do a better job of that. And although you can save action items and assign them, Google Docs is not a task manager. Organizing things like issues on pages or sections of Google Docs is much heavier than adding cards to a collection. Something like Monday.com is more appropriate.

On the other hand, applications like Trello or Monday are not a document. They don't do as well when you want to print something or forward the PDF – when you want to create a reading experience. For someone who needs to consume and absorb the intel from those sessions, it's not as good.

Alternatively, you might be thinking videos... Videos are all the rage right? We're actually very big on Loom, Zoom and videos. We're already rolling out video updates. But videos also have their own trade-offs in this data flow context. They're not always as convenient to watch or listen to, and they don't necessarily lend themselves as easily to comments, collaboration, etc.

And last but not least, Google Docs is also not the best experience as a user for team members. It's a bit more like a chore that you tackle to be a good team player and to do your part. It's also near terrible for the facilitator. It's exciting and fun the first time you build the template but it rapidly gets old, heavy, and tedious. Doesn't it?

Not the biggest issue, to be facing such challenges. But it's a pervasive issue, nonetheless.

Meetings, work sessions, or huddles are everywhere. Even when you consciously eliminate them, you'll end up with at least some kind of scrum, a weekly team session and something to cap off the month, the quarter and the year. If there's waste or friction around them, which there usually is, it does have a pretty significant impact on the business and people over time.

As illustrated in Darren Hardy's Compound Effect [7], a one-degree deviation from the ship on this end can mean the difference between reaching the shore in England versus the Arctic Circle on the other end of your journey. Gunk that compounds in the gears of your business can eventually turn fatal and grind you to a halt.

On our end, we initially ran with Trello and Monday for almost two years. It served us well. Some of us were fond of it and I would recommend it as a version one. But we grew out of it.

Now that we have our own platform however, we sometimes start with a super simple version of Google docs or Google sheets first. We tolerate that for days or weeks, and then build a use case to whip out some tools on our no-code platform in a matter of minutes or hours – not days and weeks... or months!!!

We could actually even do away with the first steps in sheets or docs but we haven't even rolled out the platform to all the team members yet... lol! So we're not quite there yet. But soon...

The platform | Log in

Once one of our team members get outfitted with a user profile on the platform, they log in and go to their home/main page, typically referred to as "My Stuff". From there, they have a bunch of tools they can pick from in their left navigation menu.

Typically, we choose a handful for them that we think will be useful, catering specifically to their team and business function. If you need anything else...:

1. You just click on "edit tools" and can add more stuff.
2. … such as the "Better Meetings" tool.

You then choose which of our typical views you want for the tool in question:

Add a tool:

Pick views for that tool:

• The table view has a lot more info across all the columns like Monday.com would.
• The kanban board view let's you flow things across a workflow, Trello-style.
• The calendar view is self explanatory and we haven't used it much yet. We have a couple of powerful integrations in mind that might change that in the near future.
• The list view is a good mix of a list on the left and a preview pane on the right.
• And the cards view are also a bit Trello-like but with much more details visible.

You can also use the tags to filter data if you want only want to see your preferred portion of that whole data set in your "My Stuff" home page. e.g. use a Tasks tool for all your backlog and add a second Tasks tool to filter only tasks with a "high priority" tag.

You can also rename the tool to whatever you like that gets you more inspired and engaged. (e.g rename your work sessions tool "jams" or "pow-wows" or "get together" or whatever floats your boat...). It also helps to be able to rename tools when you focus on just a subset of that data, like the "High Priority" example we used here.

Most of these tools are data sets, a concept we will unpack in the next section.

The data set

The concept of a data set on the platform is a bit like a database you would build from a series of forms that your people fill. So the interface behaves a bit like a form builder. First, you look at what fields you need to assemble, in a code-less fashion, to capture the data you want to flow to the rest of the business.

Tags

e.g. Adding people in a meeting tags them automatically. And anything tagged with your name shows up in your "My Stuff" area.

If you're in another space in the application like a "Team" or a "Project" of any kind, tags for that team or project determine what shows up as far as data in that space. Tags are like the conduits by which data flows on the platform.

This meeting, as an example, would automatically flow all the relevant data about rescuing puppies in burning buildings to these:

• users: Bob, Suzie & Niko
• teams: The Firefighters, Digital Marketing Team, eRational
• project: New Puppy Saving Fireproof Suit
• business function: Product Management

If you're one of our super users, you also have access to another top layer referred to as the HQ or Head Quarters. There you can see all the data across all the organizations and further help building tools and organize information.

Why | Who

The Why | Who tab include what the purpose of the session is – and which Key Result it's driving (from our Objectives & Key Results).

We specifically identify who leads the session and who manages it, as well as all attending team members and attending clients. The session lead sets the purpose, the direction and the tone. The session manager makes sure to keep time, flow data, keep the team on topic, enforce the framework, etc.

We also have a placeholder for a cover image so you can at least attempt to inspire the team, and have a little fun by sprucing things up! lol! :)

When | Where | Status

The When | Where | Status tab is where we indicate:

• date and time
• as well as duration and frequency of the session
• include a video chat link and password when relevant
• and also indicate what status of the workflow this meeting is currently in

– in the screenshot you can see it's currently live and the drop down to select from any of the other stages of the workflow: (not scheduled yet, upcoming & prep, wrap up & data flow, debrief & follow-up, data flow QA).

Prep | Intel

That tab regroups the more tactical stuff like related files and the prep work you would like some of the attendees to engage in.

• distribute prep assignments (that we will describe shortly).
• share update briefs – which are formal briefs and short videos on topics that you need the participants to be aware of.
• share any related files (and provide context on what they need to consume ahead of the session).
• and ask questions in advance on the material provided – that people can either answer ahead of time or during the session.

You might notice a timer at the top of the prep work tab. Since we use the platform for our time tracking as well, this built-in timer will track the time each team member spends prepping for this session.

This text field in the prep work section uses a light checklist feature when we don't need it to connect to our more robust task management boards. You can put people's name next to a checkbox to let them know you're counting on them to get that done.

You create a checkbox in the text editor by just entering "[]" or you can type a slash "/" to open the text editor menu.

But based on one of our awesome partners suggestion, we even recently added real tasks you can assign to your teammates in preparation for the session (where it says "Prep assignments". These are true tasks that will show up in our built-in robust task manager, for each of the people involved.

– I added that feature right after he mentioned it in one of our chats... It must have taken me a good... 2 minutes to add and configure. And THAT is what happens when brilliant folks with decades of building custom ERPs decide to supercharge you with a code-less builder... lol!

We can't thank our tech partners enough. They're awesome and allowing us to remove so much of the pain that comes with scaling when you're acquiring something like a new agency or new tech every quarter, or so...

It must have taken me a good... 2 minutes to add and configure that new feature.

You can see that one of my tasks consisted in updating this article for the use case. This way the participants can prepare their session by getting introduced to the main concepts they're about to experiment with.

– Not to get too META here but the whole reason we wrote this article was to reduce our meeting time... It's our way of sharing the info with our people ahead of their on-boarding session. And we thought it'd be fun to share with the world.

Meeting Cadence

I have searched high and low for a meeting software that lets you run timers for each of the sections on your agenda. I won't name them here to spare their feelings, but we must have tried two dozens over the last couple of years. From the fanciest and uber-expensive, as part of a bigger suite, to the small and nimble, affordable or even open-source ones...

And nothing has done the trick to date. They tend to be either clunky or missing key features. Or, we can't justify the bang for the buck when it comes to cost per seat. So we're now using our own timers to craft something that will allow us to do that directly on the platform. As my partner, Thomas, loves to put it:

Version one is better than version none. – T.

Our first attempt was quite a bit clunky at first, and buggy at times. We continually release, 3-5 times a day, with a small dev team so it gets experimental at times. And we're perfectly fine with that. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!

That specific experiment with the timers could actually be so awful for some, that my partner, as an example, wanted to just get off his on-boarding call once he saw what used to be then a wall of timers, for each of the agenda blocks... :). But it worked, albeit painfully at first, and it showed so much promise!

The reason it was so awful at first is that the type of timer fields we experimented with there we're never meant for that specific use. That was a temporary hack. We were assembling some of the building blocks to get a feel for how the user experience should look like.

And it's by using the awful version one that we were able to fuel our developers to shape it into new properties, new tools and new ways of capturing data. We'll have a new improved version of that in a matter of hours, days or weeks – depending on the the effort level and the priority.

One of the main challenges we had there is that it was just a collection of timers that track time at the individual level. So if I was running a timer, you wouldn't see the pace unless I shared my screen. It was also affecting performance.

But we captured all the user stories we want around that and we have a slew of features in the backlog to make it better, tighter, and much more fun. We're VERY EXCITED for the next MAJOR UPDATE, in the next little while.

[update] These bunch of pace timers were actually starting to drive us nuts so we to evolve to a single timer to be able to capture split times properly and we'll figure out a way to connect it to the agenda blocks in the months ahead. So we're back to a single timer to regain a bit of our sanity... lol...

Agenda

There's a text field with a WYSIWYG editor to populate your agenda

We also include a pointer that allows to grab any 1 or 2 topics from the issues list that you would like the team to collaborate in solving, when applicable (for a weekly team huddle as an example).

A pointer is a feature that allows you to either search a data point from an existing data set elsewhere in the platform (like the issues list, in this case) or to add a new record and piece of data to that data set.

Solve Issues | IDS

We've created a separate tab to run the IDS (Identify, Discuss & Solve) framework to solve issues we gather on our issues list – Something we learned through the incredible work of Gino Wickman and his team at EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System).

Recordings & transcripts, Next Session

If you want to truly advance the business, it's important to make recordings and transcripts available for attendees and related parties. Whatever decisions were made, whatever healthy debate occurred, it can be quite useful to share or review. Going over the few minutes of the discussion and the clip that is of consequence for the work you have to follow up can provide essential context.

To keep things simple, we include those records directly in the data set. So it will forever be available to anyone who needs more details or more context.

We also included a pointer function that can easily duplicate your current session, so you can simply set up the next date, next agenda and communicate everything you need right now.

And we also added a new pointer to create other related break out or side bar sessions. There's something awesome about having a space where you can gather all your stuff, insights, comments and etc. ahead of getting some face time with a team mate...

–And yes, I know you can theoretically do that in a Google Calendar invite... But let's get real here. we actually love our People... so we don't believe in torture. Google rocks on many front. And the UI/UX of a calendar invite is NOT their forte...

Workflow

All of our tasks live in workflows. And it was starting to get a bit redundant to have tasks around prep for meetings as well as debriefing or follow-ups. So we associated this data set with a simple kanban workflow. The meeting lives in a "prep" stage before it occurs, an "in progress" while it takes place and a debrief stage for your follow up.

This is an easy way to set up any feedback loops you need for the system to improve over time through constant iterations, based on feedback from the key stakeholders.

Since we have conditional logic built-in, it means you can set conditions on certain things that must get done for the meeting to take place. This can act as a "gate" from a systems thinking perspective. Keep in mind that these data sets are not meant to be just internal. All the tools are just as useful for our client facing time.

Furthermore, you can also perform certain tasks automatically when you switch the card from stage to stage. In this case, we are working on setting up the "debrief" stage to automatically share the HTML version of the data set to all attendees or anyone else in the company.

The function already exists. We're just working on easier automation to parse all the meeting info into a slick gorgeous html document. It will allow us to essentially send a cool newsletter with all the highlights to share the narrative with our other people.

We are constantly upgrading our document builder so the documents we produce there can easily be used as email templates, newsletters, web pages, PDF documents or else.

Data Flow

One of the most significant weaknesses around meetings is that there is rarely an efficient way to truly flow all the data that stems from such events. We, therefore, made sure to include the ability to send any relevant data to our issues list, our action items board, our decision log, our insight log, or the Q&A list.

Issues List

We used to run our business on the Entrepreneurial Operating System [8] for a little while, before recently moving forward with the Scaling Up framework. We loved EOS and it had a massive positive impact on our growth at a critical time in our journey.

Scaling Up [9] just became a better fit for our type of company, on course for a massive roll-up and consolidation strategy. It's also more attuned to the kind of hyper-growth that we are focused on.

One key concept we kept from EOS though is to maintain an issues list.

Issues are problems, but also opportunities, threats, or else that we keep track of collectively. Every week, we pick a handful to solve using Gino Wickman's brilliant IDS process (Identify, Discuss, Solve). And we tap into the collective brain trust to do so.

We included a pointer property in our form that allows us to create issues that are sent automatically to that other data set while keeping a tab on it directly in the meetings.

What you see in the image above is the list of issues created in the meeting with a stateful data point that uses a check mark to track issues that have been solved (during the session or subsequently).

Everything from this session rolls automatically in the next session. To avoid clutter over time, you can unlink items so they stop appearing in your meeting data set once they're done or flowed to another part of the business.

In the image below, you see what the full "Issues List" data set looks like elsewhere in the system. You can view any data set with a board view, calendar view, list, or table view. This is an example of the list view with a preview pane on the right.

• Side Note: as we strive to implement maker time [10] every morning, for most of our thinkers and tinkerers, in a not-so-distant future, we're pretty pumped about dedicating Fridays to maker time! – at one of our agencies that specializes in growth hacking.

Action Items

Action items are tasks that stem from the meeting. We are working on the logic for them to live with the other tasks in our task management system (while remaining associated with the meeting or work session they originated from). We use one of our kanban boards to move tasks along the way from the "backlog" to "doing" and "done".

Decisions Log

Loose decision-making routinely plagues businesses, even some of the most successful ones. Since what we measure improves, we've started to build the practice and discipline of recording our business decisions in a decision log.

Firstly, it will allow us to ensure that when something is decided, the proper change management takes place as well as ensuring that procedures, processes, and policies are updated accordingly.

Otherwise, you're constantly ailed with a Frankenstein set up where none of the maverick decisions have been properly integrated into operations. New ways of going about the business are constantly out of sync – since they are not communicated or implemented systematically.

Secondly, as the legendary Ray Dalio illustrates it in the excellent Principles [11], there's a tremendous value in formalizing decisions with the intended effect on the business. This way we can scientifically track the record of those decisions and include them in the organizational learning and business intelligence. Thanks Ray!

Insights

In order to keep up with an ever-changing and explosively dynamic market, we have to read a lot, browse a lot, learn a lot, and keep in touch with multiple mentors and industry leaders. As we do so, we often encounter insights that we'd like to share with the rest of our leaders and team members.

We mention them in passing, here and there; we recommend books; we mention a paper or an article; we share an experience from a previous venture or something we learned at a conference or in a program...

We keep track of all those in our "Sources" data set. Building a library of sources helps us to weed out the anecdotal decision making over time. From those sources, we break out thoughts, reading notes and remarks into "insights".

Sharing insights as such can be fleeting. And we've been looking for a way to capture those and make them available for the whole team. This is what brought us to start building this insights log where we can now recommend books, comment on articles, shares words of wisdom from favorite mentors, etc.

By having it handy during meetings, any insights shared there can be captured to share and circulate with the full team across the larger organization. Simple initiatives like this one get us one step closer on our journey to roll out fully distributed and highly robust business intelligence.

We cannot empower our people to make great decentralized business decisions in the field, in real-time, without a proper intelligence system like the one described in the game-changing Nine Lies about work: a freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World. [12] If you're not yet familiar with the next level work of the brilliant Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, I highly recommend it .

Question list

Over and above the issues list, we also fuel a list of questions that can circulate ahead, during, and after the meeting to ensure that everything gets answered promptly without derailing the agenda or running long.

Once the questions have been answered, they act as a repository of Questions & Answers that can help others find immediate answers to their questions.

Group Notes/Comments log

One thing we really liked about Google Docs was the ability to take collective notes that updated in real-time. The closest thing we have to that on the platform is the comments log, at the bottom of the data set page. Each note automatically tags the author, includes a timestamp, can be edited, and replied to. We are therefore currently using that comment log for group notes while we work on something more permanent.

You currently have to refresh your browser to get notes exactly in real-time but one of our upcoming performance updates will deploy polling for now until we roll out our more permanent sockets solution to cater to that.

Other exciting user stories and features coming to life soon!

Over and above the list of cool features we just shared, there are a few more we are experimenting with. We also have a list of features in the backlog. We need to implement those to make the experience better. They will improve usability, reduce noise and clutter, and avoid people wanting to jump off calls from things being temporarily awful :) Here are some of the exciting ones in the works:

[NEW] New features we just rolled out

• Added a session leader field: when it comes to work sessions, workshops or better meetings, it can help to assign both a leader and a manager. The leader sets the vision and direction for how that time is invested for team members, what the purpose is like and what success looks like.
• The session manager field: the manager supports the leader and helps to ensure: that people show up, that rules of engagement are observed and that proper record keeping takes place by ensuring participants learn how to capture and flow the data properly
• Full-width images to enliven data sets and make them more palatable i.e. more visually appealing

• Links that can take you directly to a data set or a single object in a data set on the platform.

This way, if we want to share something in slack or else, it's much easier and much more elegant to do so. As long as you're already logged into the platform, thee link will take you right there.

• Tabs to make long data sets more user friendly to navigate. Similar to the ones you see here... – They're here and they're awesome!!!

• Adding a type to data sets so you can have multiple templates within a data set e.g. different templates for different types of meetings within that data set (same page meetings, daily huddles, 1:1, strategy council, quarterly offsite, etc.) – Subsets are also here and they're even more awesome!!!

[/NEW]

Coming Soon: other features in the pipeline

• Creating a "private" tag in order to keep some sensitive information private. The "private" tag will also empower our team members to use the platform to organize all their personal stuff, if so they choose, therefore driving adoption up. It's so much more pleasant if you have one awesome platform to manage both your personal and professional interests, stuff, files, calendars, lists, tasks, insights, etc. We do have a workaround that can do that already at the permission level but we're looking for something lighter that you can just tag on and off without digging into the config.
• Building a note property that lives in the middle of the form but fuels the comments log at the bottom for better user experience.
• Categories of notes so we can filter the group notes under different note tabs based on the nature of the data captured
• Separating the presentation layer from the back-end so we can produce a much bolder modern and edgy user interface for data sets.
• Further integration of our better meeting lists and tables with our scheduling functions and integrations.

• At the view level, we're also in discussion to enable a slider view once we start revamping the User Interface and User experience. There's something oddly satisfying about being able to just "flip" through a series of slide and drill down when need be, when it's well done.

Is there anything else you can think of?

Feel free to let me know what you'd like to see there. What else do you wish you had a magic wand for?

As we reset the way we approach work, in these crazy pandemic times, it's about time we get to slay the ultimate time vampire, once and for all...

Let me know what pains you're personally dealing with so we can build a better pain reliever for it.

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* More on the Core Genius and how we've decided to craft a system to Put People First, in our next article in this series.

[1] It's fascinating how the corporate rebels rapidly find one another and gravitate. Back when we worked in media, we'd often congregate for a few minutes outside the headquarters, having a smoke or grabbin' a breath of fresh air. As one of my favorite Senior VP passed by, entering the building, he'd wave, laugh and shout:

What are you boys up to this time? Up to no good again?! LOL!

And that's how we ended up as the Up to No Good pack for the next 3-4 years. 3 of the most brilliant product managers or business creatives I've come to encounter, always connecting the dots, raising the bar and throwing conventions out the windows for the sake of evolution. I will always be grateful for the mutual inspiration and precious influence of these irreverent mavericks.

[2] Unless you practice super packed extreme updates like the 1 min daily huddles from the game-changing Scaling Up by Verne Garnish and The Gazelles group

[3] Source: As illustrated in the brilliant "Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World" by Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall, in the chapter covering the astonishing history of the original war room and how it changed the fate of the world and how we flow data nowadays.

[4] Explore the work of leading expert Tony McCaffrey in the video below on how incredibly ineffective brainstorms have always been and how much more powerful brainswarming can be.

[5] A practice inspired by Scaling Up (see reference [2] above)

[6] Source: M&A: The One Thing You Need to Get Right, Roger L. Martin, HBR Review

“M&A is a mug’s game: Typically 70%-90% of acquisitions are abysmal failures.”

[7] Source: An excellent book on how small changes or incremental challenges will over time have a Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

[8] Source: The elegantly simple, yet incredibly effective Entrepreneurial Operating System by Gino Wickman

[9] Source: Also from the game-changing Scaling Up by Verne Garnish and The Gazelles group

[10] Source: Manager's schedule vs maker's schedule as popularized by the legendary Paul Graham Essay and further illustrated in this great piece on the Farnam Street Blog

[11] Source: The incredibly inspiring Principles by no other than Ray Dalio

[12] Source: Also in the brilliant "Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World" by Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall).