Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

80% of your time in meetings, and 30% of it is pure waste (here's why)

3 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment of Ashish Kothari’s video on meeting waste, two speakers contrast two leadership approaches. The first story describes a leader who recognized that his own behavior was contributing to poor outcomes, chose to change himself first, and focused on internal transformation rather than trying to immediately fix external processes. The second story depicts a leader who relied on a directive, command‑and‑control style—telling people what to do, structuring conversations to meet his own agenda, and reacting with anger when faced with resistance. This approach caused disengagement among team members. The leader eventually realized that by simply asking people what they needed and wanted, he could achieve higher engagement and better results. The key takeaway is that personal self‑adjustment and a consultative, needs‑focused approach are more effective for productive meetings than authoritarian tactics.

Chapters

A leader who changed himself first. Recognizing this was hard, his own behavior was part of the problem, he decided to take action. And rather than change things out there, started to change himself within.
It was a leader who learned that they could get results by telling people what to do and structuring the conversation to deliver what the leader needed and what the leader wanted. And he found that a lot of people would disengage from that because they felt there was a different way of doing it. So what did the leader do? They got angry. They started to shout. They started to insist that their way was the right way. My way or the highway, which is an expression that's often used when people are being threatened with losing their job. But he then realized that if he actually asked people what they wanted and what they needed, he would actually get a better engagement from people.