This works great except 95% of the places I've been with bad meeting culture, it comes from the top.
Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.
In my experience, most folks appreciate a gentle hint to stick to the agenda. I don’t hang out with “execs” though.
Execs that have responsibilities appreciate sticking to agendas. But there are a lot of Elon Musks in the world.
Didn't Elon Musk have in his companies that thing of if you have no value to add or receive from a meeting, you can leave it?
No idea but someone who claims to work harder than just about everyone else while managing to be on social media all day is hilarious.
This goes way back further then Musk. I remember working at a large corporation in early 2000 before the first dot com crash that had severe meeting issues. At one point, I was having two or three hour long meetings during the week on what another meeting later in the week was supposed to cover.
The CEO of the company got caught fooling around with a co-worker and abruptly resigned. The new CEO came in and found out what a mess meetings had become and issued the same proclamation - if a meeting isn't productive and produce some actionable items, then it shouldn't be scheduled. If you're not 100% required in a meeting, don't go. If you're in a meeting and feel its a waste of time, then leave.
Just those simple rules got rid of half of my meetings and the several teams I was on suddenly were cranking through sprints, building some amazing apps and products and killing our delivery times. The entire company suddenly was cooking along. It was a real eye opener how you can really bog a Fortune 500 company down just by clogging people's time up with useless meetings.
I’ve seen it come mostly from participants who are more dominant or verbose in the conversation than others, often leading to the meeting being a lengthy back and forth between two people because nobody else can get a word in and the person running or facilitating it isn’t keeping it in check.
Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them.
I've been through too many of these. They like to sit at the head of the table and bask in the glow of their underlings like they're king for an hour.