Comments on: Meetings As Flattery

By: Planner Reads » Blog Archive » On Meetings

Planner Reads » Blog Archive » On Meetings — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:40:31 +0000

[...] That comes via Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias, adding, [...]

By: Ryan Vann

Ryan Vann — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:09:31 +0000

I have a different perspective, namely that meetings are a means to a) justify a job position b) engage in highly level shirking.

By: On Meetings » Lone Gunman

On Meetings » Lone Gunman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:14:15 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: cezary

cezary — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:00:22 +0000

Oh, are you a board member at Apple Inc.? Or are you quoting some prose? Clark Kent also didn’t attend all the meetings it was expected from him, sometimes he had to save the world.

By: pdf23ds

pdf23ds — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:28:29 +0000

The person driving the meeting can make a huge difference in its efficiency.

By: ChrisA

ChrisA — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:13:54 +0000

Surely if there were large gains in getting rid of meetings, these would be obvious in business success and people would have noticed this effect. After all you believe in this free market competitive approach in other areas. In real businesses meetings, from my experience, are very useful and necessary when you have a large team working together on a common goal or project, in fact I have often found that we don’t have enough of them as people often dislike them and see them as a distraction from their real work. There has to be regular discussions to pass information around that is needed and a meeting is often the most effective way. I would suggest perhaps that the issue about useless meetings is largely confined to academia and government, which copy business by a process of sympathetic magic but can’t go out of business. Some companies have a large enough moat around their business to act like this for a while, but most don’t.

By: Katja Grace

Katja Grace — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:47:28 +0000

This seems correct to me. It is not in contradiction though. Both the meeting topic (and attendees) and the high ranking person invited benefit from the affiliation. This is the same as interpersonal affiliations usually – the lower status person gains status for following someone cool, and the cool person gains status by having another follower.

By: Bill

Bill — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:44:47 +0000

There is probably a difference between “time in meeting” and attending a meeting at all. I do not know how you could test the efficiency of a meeting, but what I proposed would test the hypothesis of status attendance.

By: Simon K

Simon K — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:07:35 +0000

Meetings are often really about ensuring that the group of people who could interfere with a course of action are on-the-record as having approved it. This ensures that later attempts (whether well-intentioned or otherwise) to change it have to be made by the same group. This is somewhat self-reinforcing – the people with the social status to change the decision have to agree to it and agree (as usually happens!) to change it, which means they attend lots of meetings, which further reinforces that they’re the guys with the status to change decisions.

You can argue that this is all very inefficient, and certainly there are parasites who are in the inner circle but not really needed there. But I’d say the cost of allowing the parasitism is much smaller than the cost of not getting buy-in from the people you need it from, so we tend to have longer, larger meetings that would be strictly efficient. Many business decisions are made in conditions of extreme uncertainty, but have to be executed by people across the whole company, who may disagree and could disrupt the plan if they chose. Having the meeting puts everyones proverbial body-parts under the axe if the decision is not carried out.

By: jonathan

jonathan — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:09:47 +0000

The key word is “let” but then what do you expect from people? I’ve just finished reading about the Somme and one issue is whether Rawlinson – and of course Haig – was too detached from the fighting level. How do you balance? It’s not easy. Steve Jobs gets into specific detail of specific projects but not others. How many execs are that smart and disciplined?