Con­tem­plat­ing how to lead with­out meet­ings , The Wash­ing­ton Post asks three equally qual­i­fied peo­ple for their views on them. Daisy Wade­man Dowl­ing, exec­u­tive direc­tor of lead­er­ship devel­op­ment at an unnamed For­tune 500 com­pany, responded with the following:

The real rea­son lead­ers end up in too many meet­ings? Because it’s flat­ter­ing: hav­ing your pres­ence “required” at many meet­ings makes you feel impor­tant — it’s tan­gi­ble proof of how much your peo­ple and your orga­ni­za­tion need you. But being in too many meet­ings every day wreaks havoc on your sched­ule and your abil­ity to focus on big­ger goals. I’ve seen too many cor­po­rate lead­ers sac­ri­fice their own strate­gic vision — and ulti­mately, their own per­for­mance — because they’ve let them­selves become hostage to Con­fer­ence Room B.

That comes via Robin Han­son of Over­com­ing Bias, adding,

Much of busi­ness process func­tions to sig­nal who is impor­tant and who is allied with whom, rather than to actu­ally get stuff done. Huge effi­ciency gains await the orga­ni­za­tions that can fig­ure out how to expunge these parasites.

Behav­ioural sci­en­tist Reid Hastie recently reflected about meet­ings and why they often are unpro­duc­tive (via Kot­tke): it seems that one rea­son is our mis­per­cep­tion of time.

As a gen­eral rule, meet­ings make indi­vid­u­als per­form below their capac­ity and skill levels.

This doesn’t mean we should always avoid face-to-face meet­ings — but it is cer­tain that every orga­ni­za­tion has too many meet­ings, and far too many poorly designed ones.

The main rea­son we don’t make meet­ings more pro­duc­tive is that we don’t value our time prop­erly. The peo­ple who call meet­ings and those who attend them are not think­ing about time as their most valu­able resource.

Hastie offers three tips on con­duct­ing effec­tive meetings:

  • The unin­spired, Who­ever calls a meet­ing should be explicit about its objectives.
  • The excel­lent, Every­one should think care­fully about the oppor­tu­nity costs of a meeting.
  • And the sur­pris­ing, After pro­duc­tive or unpro­duc­tive meet­ings, assign credit or blame to the per­son in charge.

Here are some fur­ther tips on how to pre­pare for a meet­ing with ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Brad Feld. I believe these tips can be gen­er­alised and broadly applied:

  • Search the web for me.
  • Fig­ure out the one thing you want to com­mu­ni­cate with me.
  • Don’t make our meet­ing an end­less stream of Planet Feld references.
  • Have one thing in your head that you think I can learn from you.
  • Don’t ask me to sign an NDA.
  • Pay atten­tion to time.