Summary
Andy Grove called meetings the medium of managerial work. Bad meetings are a design failure, and the fix is better design. Give every meeting an output, keep the regular cadence strong so that special meetings stay rare, move status updates into writing, and open every invite with IDOARRT. Then have the courage to cancel any meeting that has nothing to produce.
Why we hate what we need most
Ask any manager what clogs their calendar and the answer comes fast. Meetings. They are the punchline of office jokes and the thing people apologise for when they send another invite.
Take them away and the organisation falls apart. Projects drift. People lose context. Without meetings there is no shared reality, only isolated effort.
We need meetings, and we do not know how to run them. Andy Grove, who led Intel, put it more sharply in High Output Management:
“Meetings are the medium of managerial work.”
He meant it literally. A painter works with colour and a coder with code. A manager works with meetings. They are not a break from the real work. They are the work.
A manager’s output is the output of the team. The way a manager shapes it, by aligning priorities, transferring knowledge, solving problems, and motivating people, is structured conversation. So the task is to take meetings back.
A production line for decisions
Grove loved factory analogies. He described running a team like running a breakfast factory: identify the inputs, track the flow, remove bottlenecks, and measure yield. A meeting is a production line for decisions, clarity, or alignment. If you do not know what you are producing, you cannot design the line.
That is why so many meetings feel like a tax. They are factories without a product. People come because the meeting is in the calendar, and nobody can name the outcome it should create.
Give a meeting a clear output and it changes. One hour that ends in a documented, communicated decision saves dozens of hours of drift. One one-on-one that clears a block can speed up a month of work. Small input, large output.
Two families of meetings
Grove sorted meetings into two families. Each does a different job.
Process-oriented: the scaffolding
These are the regular cadence. Their value is rhythm.
- One-on-ones. A manager and a team member meet on a fixed schedule. It is a working session for coaching, feedback, and the detail that never surfaces in a group. This is where a manager teaches and where someone says what worries them.
- Staff meetings. The whole team meets for lateral learning rather than top-down reporting. People hear what their peers do, see how the work interlocks, and find the dependencies. The manager talks less and orchestrates more.
- Operational reviews. These are larger and more formal. Teams present results to peers and superiors. Done badly, they are theatre. Done well, they are a classroom where managers learn from each other’s numbers, because nobody wants to show sloppy work to colleagues they respect.
Process meetings batch managerial work. Instead of a hundred small interruptions, concerns and feedback land in predictable slots.
Mission-oriented: the specials
These are called to solve one problem or make one decision. They are ad hoc and, by design, rare.
Grove warned that if more than 25% of a manager’s time goes into them, something is broken. The scaffolding is too weak and the team lives on improvisation. When they are needed (a crisis, a decision that cannot wait, a conflict that needs a face-to-face conversation), they work if the purpose, the chair, and the decision-maker are clear and the outcome is documented straight away.
Why meetings feel broken today
Grove’s categories have aged well. Our habits have not. Calendars look like a game of Tetris gone wrong: blocks jammed together, no white space, no room to think.
- Too many people. Invites go out like confetti. Few people speak, most multitask, and the contribution per head trends to zero.
- Too long. Parkinson’s Law applies, and discussion fills the slot. A 20-minute decision takes an hour because the box says 60.
- No IDOARRT. Few meetings open with their Intention, Desired Outcomes, Agenda, Roles, Rules, and Time.
- Fear of missing out. People attend because they fear being left out of decisions, even when they have nothing to add.
- Status overload. Sharing updates is no reason to gather live.
None of this is inherent to meetings. These are design flaws, like a clunky product that does not fit its purpose. After enough bad meetings, people conclude that all meetings are bad. They forget that a good one is a privilege: time together to think, decide, and align.
Three modern practices
Async by default. Status updates, progress, and metrics can be written, recorded, or put on a dashboard. Writing sharpens the message, and readers take minutes instead of an hour. Live time is then free for what people do best together: debate, generate ideas, and decide.
Silent meetings. Amazon’s six-page memo is one version. Everyone gathers and reads for the first 15 minutes. The memo holds the context, the options, and the recommendation. Only then does the discussion begin. Nobody is catching up, the debate is better, and the louder voices lose some of their advantage.
IDOARRT. Intention, Desired Outcomes, Agenda, Roles, Rules, Time. Put it at the top of every invite. Why are we meeting? What will exist when we are done? Who does what? How do we behave? How long do we have? An invite without it is a factory without a specification.
Two illustrative examples
The two people below are illustrations. Neither is a real case.
Take a product lead; call her Anna. She ran a weekly staff meeting that people dreaded: two hours of updates, 20 attendees, and jokes about it on Slack. She moved status into a shared document to be read beforehand, cut the invite list to the 10 people with decisions to make, and put IDOARRT into the invite. The first meeting took 45 minutes. The team debated one hard launch decision, made it, named an owner, and noted the risks. By 10 a.m. people left with energy. The difference was design.
Now take a marketing manager; call him Marcus. He was invited to 40 hours of meetings a week and attended many of them out of fear of missing out. His director set a norm: every meeting produces written notes with decisions and owners in a shared log, and attendance is optional unless you contribute. Marcus skipped three meetings, caught up in minutes, and felt relief. His calendar opened up and his contributions got sharper. The organisation had reduced its meetings, and it had also reduced fear.
What the research says
Poor meetings drain energy. Psychologists call the fatigue that lingers after a wasted session “meeting recovery syndrome”. Remote work makes it worse: reading micro-expressions, handling several streams at once, and dealing with latency all raise the cognitive load.
The reverse holds too. When people feel their time is used well, they report higher engagement, stronger trust, and better alignment. Research on meeting-free days points to higher productivity and autonomy, because the meetings that remain matter more. That is Grove’s point again: the fault lies in the design, and design can change.
Efficient, effective, and willing to cancel
At Vorwerk Home we talk about efficiency (doing things right) and effectiveness (doing the right things). Meetings need both. An efficient meeting has a tight process, clear roles, and a decision log. An effective one first asks whether it should exist at all.
Cancelling a meeting takes courage. It protects collective attention. If there is no outcome to produce, we do not meet. Apply that across a company and ask how many hours would move from ritual to creation.
Honour the medium
Meetings are among humanity’s oldest tools. Tribes decided around a fire, cities were governed in assemblies, and companies started at a table. Cathedrals, space programmes, and start-ups all began with people sitting together, debating and deciding.
Picture a Wednesday afternoon. A team opens with 10 minutes of silent reading, then 30 minutes of sharp debate. A decision is made, owners are named, and notes go out within the hour. Nobody attended out of fear, and everyone who needed to contribute did. That is possible. It takes Grove’s clarity, modern tools, and the courage to say no.
Meetings are the medium of managerial work. Our job is to make them worthy of that role.