Who gets excited about going to an office meeting? Who dreads them? Rebecca Hinds, Ph.D., is an organization expert who has helped Fortune 500 companies fix their fractured collaboration efforts, and she says that meetings are broken. They are relics from a bygone era of top-down hierarchies and factory-like procedures—designed to issue orders, flaunt power, and keep the hierarchy intact. In today’s digital, collaborate-or-bust era, this model isn’t just inefficient, she says it actively harms employees and organizations. 

She drew on decades of research and stories from leading companies like Google, Salesforce, Pixar, YouTube, and Dropbox for her new book Your Best Meeting Ever. She provides a blueprint to transform meetings from monotonous, soul-crushing time sinks into powerful tools for collaboration. Her secret? Treat them like products. Using seven product design principles, she says you’ll turn your meetings into well-designed products that actually drive work forward and serve your most important users—the people in your organization.

She explains:

• Why every organization needs a “Meeting Doomsday” to reset collaboration, and how to strategically orchestrate one at your company.
• How to fix your communication system so meetings are a last resort, not a knee-jerk default.
• Which meeting metrics matter—and which do more harm than good.
• How to inject moments of delight into your meetings so people genuinely want to show up.
• When to integrate technology into your meetings so you enhance collaboration, rather than detract from it.

Whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, join us to meet Rebecca Hinds and learn her ideas for challenging the existing norms and embracing new paradigms—so you’ll never dread another meeting again.