Meetings: A Necessary Evil of Business

​“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings.” — Dave Barry

Few things unite the working world like a shared loathing for meetings. If you’ve ever heard someone say, “I love my job, but I hate the meetings,” you’ve just met an honest person. If you’ve heard, “I love meetings!” you’ve just met someone trying to boost morale.

Have you ever been in a recurring meeting where someone asks about your deliverables, and you realize that you haven’t even been back to your desk since the last time this meeting happened? Now, here you are, facing the same expectant stares, scrambling to sound like you’ve made progress, while internally wondering if this meeting is the very thing preventing you from actually doing the work. It’s a vicious cycle — meetings about work that leave no time for work.

And yet, meetings are an unavoidable part of modern business. Patrick Lencioni put it bluntly in Death By Meeting: “For those of us who lead and manage organizations, meetings are pretty much what we do.” Love them or hate them, meetings are where teams align, decisions get made, and strategies are set. The trick is making them worth the time spent — and that, unfortunately, is where most meetings fail spectacularly.

Too Many People in the Room

Meetings often resemble wedding guest lists: some people absolutely need to be there, some people are only there because they’d feel left out, and some people show up just to be there. The larger the meeting, the harder it is to keep everyone engaged — and the more likely it devolves into a chaotic mess of side conversations, tangents, and people pretending to take notes while actually scrolling their phones.

I once sat in a meeting with 25 people. Five knew what they were talking about. The other 20 were just there to complain. At one point, after yet another round of “we should really do something about this” with no actual plan forming, I said, “The airing of grievances phase is now over.” I’m pretty sure only five people realized I wasn’t joking.

The best way to fix this is the two-pizza rule — if two pizzas can’t feed the group, the meeting is too big. Only invite people who absolutely need to be there, and let others opt-in if they believe their input is necessary. If the meeting organizer isn’t sure why someone is on…