People complain about meandering discussion meetings and how to avoid them, but those are the only things that actually should be meetings. If you know what information you need to get out of people, just ask them to send that info in an email. If you know what decisions you need made, send the decision makers the information and ask them to make a call. If you know what people need to be informed about, again you just send it out. All of this should be done asynchronously.<p>The purpose of gathering people together is for handling the situations where you don't know a priori what is needed. For example someone suggests a course of action and someone who knows better can chime in and say "no, we're not doing that for reasons X, Y and Z" which both the person making the suggestion and the person organizing the meeting may have been completely unaware of. Or similarly someone might describe a problem they're having which others might have experience with handling. In the extreme you obviously have situations like brainstorming. Yes, these are interruptions that cut into peoples' productivity, but they're the price you pay for having a team that is more than the sum of its parts. If you're not willing to spend burn a lot of time with a meeting, it's probably not something you should be having a meeting on at all.<p>The problem is middle managers trying to use meetings to do all of their work for them. Stand up meetings stop being about making sure everyone has situational awareness and instead become a substitute for progress reports. Decision meetings stop being about making sure leaders have all the information they need and become a means for managers to offload responsibility for a decision (and often the blame for any negative consequences)_to the group. Instead of reviewing people's performance and giving useful feedback, managers rely on employees to self regulate based on perceived peer performance norms. Who needs a schedule with strategic goals when you have the action items from last week's minutes? Management is not supposed to be a cushy reward for employees who put in a lot of time and effort, it's a vital part of an efficient team which should have a lot of work to do, and that work should not be done in meetings.