Cameron Herold lays out a framework for meetings that actually work: clear purpose, timed agenda, half the usual time, and strict attendee rules. He says leaders aren't trained to run meetings, and that telling people to skip bad ones (like Elon Musk does) misses the point. Jobs got it right by controlling who sits at the table.
Chapters
I wrote a book years ago called Meetings Suck. And the problem isn't that meetings suck, it's that we suck at running meetings. So I'll give an example. You played baseball. So somebody showed you how to hold the bat. They showed you how to swing the bat. They showed you how to catch a ball. They showed you how to throw a ball. In fact, before you went off to Little League, your dad probably practiced playing baseball with you. So that when you went to baseball, you came home and you had a little bit of fun. But when Johnny comes home from baseball and says, daddy, baseball sucks, it's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. The problem with meetings is we've never trained our managers when our leadership team on how to run highly effective meetings. So about four or five years ago, maybe longer now, maybe six years ago, Elon Musk sent out a famous tweet and he said, if you're in a shitty meeting, stand up and leave the meeting. So I sent him a text message. I've known him for 30 years. I sent him a message. I'm like, no, don't tell people to leave shitty meetings. First principles would say, fix the meetings so that people are not in shitty meetings. Teach people how to run highly effective meetings. So in my book, Meeting Stock, I created a framework for running highly effective meetings. So I'll give you the kind of core basics. Number one, every meeting has to have a clear purpose. Just why are we doing it? Number two, every meeting has to have an agenda. What are you covering, in what order are you going to cover it? And how many minutes are you going to spend on each agenda item? And then what communication style are you using for each of the agenda items? Is it infoshare, creative discussion, or is a decision being made? That's the starting point, purpose and agenda. If you don't have an agenda, allow people to say, no agenda, no agenda. Like if, if you're asking me to come to a meeting and I can't see the purpose and agenda, I'm not saying yes to coming because I have no idea why I'd be coming for. Book every meeting for half the time you first think about booking it for. So if you're going to book an hour meeting, book it for 30 minutes, right? If you're going to book a two hour meeting, book it for an hour. An all day off site, book it for half a day. You'll be amazed at what you can get done in less time. It's like a quickie, right? We can get it done in less time if we need to. Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the space and the time that we give it. Give your meetings a little bit smaller container. Next one is meetings have to start on time. The reason people show up late is because everyone books everything back to back. So create a system internally that says we finish every meeting, we finish every phone call five minutes before the scheduled ending time, which allows people to go to the bathroom, walk down the hall, talk to their assistant, get a cup of coffee, check their email, and sit down exactly on time at the start of the phone call or meeting and say, all right, I know we're on for 8 o', clock, let's start. That's the kind of basic framework, right? You need to have a moderator, a parking lot, a timekeeper. So I teach that basic framework and then I also teach that you only invite people to a meeting if you want them to contribute. If you don't want people contributing, don't invite them to a meeting. And give people the ability to opt out of meetings to say, you know what, I looked at the purpose and outcomes, I looked at the agenda. I don't think I need to be there for that. I'm good. You guys go with it. Just tell me what we decide. I'm going to sit at my desk and work through the core stuff that I need to focus on. I don't need to be involved. But so often leaders take that as a kind of a mark against them. Oh, Bobby doesn't want to come to my meeting, there's something wrong with me. No, Bobby's actually going to get some cool work done. He doesn't need to be in that meeting. And I think when you learn that, you can run much higher effective meetings. It's where Steve Jobs was mostly misunderstood. He would walk into a meeting, he'd be like, why the are you here? He wasn't being rude. He in his mind quickly calculated based on the purpose and agenda and outcomes of what we're covering. There's no need for you to be here. You should be working on X, Y and Z. That's what we need you doing, right? He was like a computer allocating resource. There should be meetings for specific purposes. So I like a daily huddle, right? A seven minute, all company standup meeting where everybody gets together and you share good news, you share the key metrics, you get a departmental update, you share any missing systems or frustrations, then you break and go back to work. When a company gets to about 250 employees, those meetings tend to become more stratified and you base them more on business areas or business units because it's too hard to get a thousand people coming to a daily huddle meeting. But a daily huddle has specific purpose. You know, you don't have a weekly meeting. You have a leadership team meeting, or you have a finance review meeting, or you have a business area review meeting, or you have a So I created a set of meeting rhythms that are needed, and the style of meeting changes based on what we're covering in each meeting. Right. A strategy meeting is run differently than a business area review. A business area review is run differently than a coaching meeting. But the problem is that most leaders don't know how to run meetings as a whole. And a meeting is anytime two or more people get together over zoom or over a phone or in person to move something forward.
