The idea of expediting the common corporate meeting has been caroming around for a while in tech media. There’s short-form analysis of participant sentiment, in the revered “scrum circle” of engineers. Now, Paul English, the founder of Kayak, has given us a book on how to innovate the common meeting for today.

Paul English is someone with MIT roots: he’s a cofounder of Boston Venture Studio, besides being a famed investor, lecturer, and leader. He has a lot to say about innovation, and entrepreneurship, and business.

A blurb on the book announcement web site sums up part of English’s argument: that meetings can be good.

“Meetings don't have to be dreaded time-sinks. They can become engines of trust, strategy, innovation, and performance and even, dare we say, fun.”

The problem, English contends, is that often, these happenings suffer from the same kinds of problems that make them a net negative for those feeling trapped inside of the convention. He starts with the statistic that 55 million meetings are held each day across America (no word on how many of them feature mandatory singing) and then estimates that the economic impact is around $180 billion, or roughly 3% of GDP.

Then he leads to the shocker: 71% of meetings, English estimates, are “unproductive.” That’s a lot.

“A typical 1,000-person company wastes almost $10 million a year on bad meetings,” English told me in an exclusive quote around this book’s release. “But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that bad meetings destroy morale.”

I would concur that this is the worst part. Workers do usually have quite a bit of discretionary productivity, and along with the time-suck that bad meetings can represent, the detriment to the corporate culture is, you might say, pricelessly bad.

“This book will teach any company how to run great meetings that energize teams and get to better decisions quickly,” English vows, and in light of the context, this is a good proposal. How could you not buy this book?

Reading about how English promotes his own brand of “meeting reform,” I was thinking about how similar the proposal is to analysis of new technologies, or business success in general. Not too long ago, we had studies showing that the vast majority of businesses don’t get ROI from AI. Why?

The way I put it, personally, is that new technologies being integrated into workflows can either be a help or a hindrance to a business, not even so much depending on how the technology is engineered, but in the way that it is integrated. I use those exact words, because I think that they have a ring to them.

Of course, design matters, too. But think about it – if your teams “don’t like” the technology, doesn’t that sort of kill the benefit? And then: why wouldn’t they like it?

I came up with a short list of things to check if you’re worried about an IT or AI mismatch:

  • Onboarding: are new people oriented to tools the right way?
  • Training: has the company invested in not just enough training, but the right training?
  • Buy-in: Have enough people indicated they like the plan?
  • Interface: Is the interface intuitive enough for the people who are going to be using it?

That’s a good start. I can say a few more things on interface. Again, design matters. The interface has to be intuitive. But even if it’s a little less intuitive, if the people using it are trained well, they’re already a step ahead. And even if it’s a little more intuitive, if your people get confused and hate it, well, you have a problem.

So English’s sentiments rang true to me right from the start.

How do you “make meetings good?”

A lot of what English is prescribing has to do with engagement, inclusion, and encouraging people to be involved, and to want to be involved. When English mentions the word “fun,” or calls or the opposite of demoralization, I think this is what he’s getting at.

Again, I will provide my own short list of checks:

  • Feedback – are people encouraged to give their own two cents?
  • Cadence – does the meeting move along well, or get mired down in words?
  • Actionable content – are people pointing to real decisions, or just reciting numbers?

Asking readers to “transform how they meet,” English references some of the companies that he feels are ahead of the curve: Amazon, Airbnb, Intuit, and LinkedIn, for some.

“Some of the most powerful companies in the technology industry run meetings to energize employees and give those companies a competitive edge with faster, better decisions,” he notes.

I would pick up a copy of this, no matter where you are in the org chart, because all of us want meetings to do what they are supposed to do, and unlock power in our workplaces.