Solve Problems Together - Leading Meetings That Matter

Author: Marcus Degerman

Review created: 2017-02-20

I was recently told by one of my team mates that a colleague from his consultancy company had challenged himself of writing a book (and getting it published) in just 90 days. As my team mate had been one of the test readers, he had received a copy of the book that he showed to me. The book was Solve Problems Together. I browsed through it and found that it seemed interesting, so I did what I usually do when I find an interesting book: I ordered it from Ad Libris. I'm not very much into process and team stuff, so even if the book had looked interesting I'm not sure if I'd bought it if it hadn't been of a manageable size. It's short (129 pages) and that's good :)

As the title suggests, the book is mainly about how to make meetings more efficient, a very commendable goal. The book contains a lot of advice about how to accomplish this. It also contains suggestions of how to generate and develop ideas.

Some of the advice given in the book are these:

• Why are we here? - state the goal of the meeting very clearly.
• Write everything up - write anything that is said in a meeting on a whiteboard, post-it notes or similar so that everyone can see it.
• One action meetings - aim for the meeting to have one, and only one, action as its outcome.

Regarding the development of ideas, the book proposes the following three steps:

1. Find insights.
2. Create ideas (from the insights).
3. Get clear output and decisions (assess and prioritize the ideas).

It has several suggestions on how to accomplish each of the three steps.

I must say that I really liked the format of the book. It is divided into eight parts and each part is divided into short chapters, where each chapter is one to three pages long. That the chapters are this short means that you easily can grab the book and read a chapter almost anywhere, e.g. on the bus between Hjalmar Brantingsplatsen and Lindholmen in Gothenburg, as ride that takes approximately ten minutes.

One thing that I don't like about the book is the look of the text in it. The text is not distinct enough. It's like it is printed using a ink jet printer that is about to run out of ink. I know that the book is really cheap (98 SEK), but I would have wanted the text in it to be a little more distinct anyway.

To summarize, Solve Problems Together is a well written easy to read book that offers (at least to me) insights about how to organize and lead meetings, and how to create and develop ideas. None of the suggestions made in the book is revolutionary, but the book makes a really good job of presenting sound advice around its topics. I would recommend the book to anyone organizing and leading meetings.

Rating: 3 out of 5.