Brad Jacobs

The people set the agenda for the meeting.

So what I do is I send out what would normally be the PowerPoint presentation of the agenda for the meeting ahead of time.

And people expected to read that.

And then I have everybody, we have an app and everybody has to fill out the app and put in their biggest takeaways that they learned from reading that and from being in the business on related subjects.

And secondly, they have to put in, okay, now we've read what our challenges are, what our opportunities are, what our goals are.

What do you think are questions that are worth going around the room once we meet in person?

It's a good use of everyone's time.

It's going to help us achieve goals of creating value for shareholders, for delighting customers, for improving their employee engagement and so forth.

And then we take all those.

We eliminate the dupes because often you get a lot of dupes on the good takeaways and the good questions.

And we send them back and everyone rates each one of those takeaways and each one of those questions on a scale of one to 10 in terms of the importance of the value that they think discussing that in the group would add.

And now we've got our agenda.

We start with the ones that have the highest rankings, and we go down until class is over.

I'm joking, class, until the meeting is over.

And that becomes an inclusive, democratic way to set the agenda that people really buy into.

They really pay attention to what's going on in the meeting because they set the agenda.

This is what they wanted to talk about.

And that's a rule of the meeting is that there are no devices on.

There are no side conversations.

There are no distractions here.