On Meetings
Filling your calendar with meetings feels productive. It never is. A packed schedule creates the illusion of momentum while starving the work that actually matters. Worse still, some wear it as a badge of honor - confusing motion for progress, presence for output.
The Roman philosopher Seneca observed it two thousand years ago: "Nusquam est qui ubique est" - he who is everywhere is nowhere. A calendar full of meetings is a person with no time to think, create, or lead.
There are only 4 reasons to hold a meeting. All these but the first one listed here are better held in person. Everything else is an email, a memo, or silence.
Arrive at a decision or a plan together
It is not about the decision or the plan - it is about being part of conceiving it. Then it is your decision, your plan, and you buy into it.
Dwight Eisenhower, before the D-Day landings, gathered his generals not to issue orders but to wrestle through the plan together. He knew that commanders who understood the reasoning behind a strategy would adapt intelligently when reality diverged from the map. Generals who merely received orders they do not understand are not capable of improvising when the plan encounters first clash with the enemy.
The meeting is not a delivery mechanism for conclusions already reached in private. If the decision has already been made before people walk into the room, you are not holding a meeting - you are holding a performance. And people always know the difference.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos institutionalized this with the six-pager - a written narrative circulated and read in silence at the start of every meeting, ensuring everyone arrives at discussion with the same foundation. The meeting then exists purely to interrogate and decide, not to present.
The goal is not consensus. The goal is commitment. Consensus is everyone agreeing. Commitment is everyone rowing - even those who argued for a different course.
Resolve conflicts
Conflicts addressed by email become permanent. Words stripped of tone, context, and eye contact calcify into grievances. The thread gets forwarded. Positions harden.
Conflicts should be addressed immediately and with all parties personally present. This always calls for a meeting.
In 1961, Kennedy and Khrushchev's only face-to-face summit in Vienna was tense and inconclusive - yet both sides maintained a back-channel of personal communication that proved decisive during the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. When the world came closest to nuclear war, it was resolved not through formal diplomacy but through the human connection established between two adversaries who had sat across a table from each other.
Proximity forces honesty. It is much harder to demonize someone you are looking at. It is much harder to misread someone when you can hear their voice waver or watch their shoulders drop.
Unresolved conflict does not disappear. It goes underground, where it poisons culture slowly and invisibly.
Build trust and culture
Transactions are built on leverage — relationships on trust.
Sales - externally and culture - internally are built on trust and trust is created tête-à-tête.
Trust is not transmitted through documents or Slack messages. It is built in the unremarkable accumulation of shared experience - the side conversations, the meals, the moments when someone reveals how they actually think under pressure.
That is why you always meet potential customers, new colleagues, or hold one-on-ones. You are not exchanging information. You are establishing whether you can rely on each other.
The Florentine merchants of the Renaissance understood this instinctively. The Medici bank did not expand across Europe through contracts alone - it expanded through a deliberate network of personal relationships, cemented by travel, hospitality, and physical presence. Trust was the product; banking was merely the transaction.
Once you have trust in a team, only then can you build culture. Nobody copies group norms and behaviors from people they do not trust.
Culture is not just values poster on the wall. It is built through observation — watching how leaders respond to what matters, what they permit, and how they handle situations when it costs them something. It spreads by contagion, not declaration.
To have maximum exposure of the group to their values and behavior, you need them in one place. You need them working and meeting together.
Julius Caesar was a master of this. He ate with his legions, marched alongside them, and made himself visible precisely when visibility was inconvenient. His soldiers did not fight for Rome in the abstract. They fought for a man they had seen sweat with them.
Have a personal touch in important situations
You do not give feedback, promote, or let someone go by email.
When Watson Sr. built IBM in the early twentieth century, he traveled relentlessly - not because he needed to, but because he understood that the company's culture would be whatever he was willing to personally embody. Every promotion, every reprimand, every moment of recognition was delivered in person. The message was not just the content - it was the effort.
Important interactions warrant presence because presence communicates something words alone cannot: This matters enough that I came.
A written message, no matter how carefully crafted, says the opposite.
Before you send that invite
Look at your calendar.
For each meeting - could this be an email? A document? A decision made by one person and communicated clearly?
If yes - cancel it. Give people back their time and yours.
If it clears the bar - prepare for it as if it matters. Because if it doesn't matter enough to prepare for, it doesn't matter enough to hold it.
The scarcest resource in any organization is not capital or talent. It is the uninterrupted time to think clearly. Every unnecessary meeting is a theft of that resource - from everyone in the room.