Dr. Allen is an industrial and organizational psychologist at the University of Utah and the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health. His specialty is workplace meetings and he’s just released his third book, co-written with journalist Karin Reed.
The book, "Running Effective Meetings for Dummies," is meant to be a guide to help people run their meetings more effectively and fix specific struggles.
Dr. Allen says he’s been interested in meetings most of his life.
“Growing up, my parents, my siblings, people around me, were often going to meetings," Allen noted. "They had work meetings, they had church meetings, they had club meetings, they had family meetings, meetings were everywhere, right? And I was kind of a curious weird fella. So I was always curious about, 'What is this whole meeting thing?'"
Dr. Allen says meetings are something that humans have been doing forever, so it surprises him that so few people study it. He wants to help people meet more effectively.
As the pandemic began in 2020 and almost everyone’s lives went virtual, Allen and his colleague Reed came up with an idea to write the book “Suddenly Virtual.” In 2021, they wrote another one called “Suddenly Hybrid,” focusing on the change into hybrid meetings.
This year their editor introduced them to the editors of the popular "Dummies" series.
“When we chatted with this person, they were immediately excited about the possibility of a dummies book that was really kind of the definitive guide to how does a person ran in a good meeting,” Allen said.
The new book launched Tuesday, September 27.
