Meetings are the worst.

I recently heard about a top hedge fund manager who runs one of the most successful hedge funds for the past decade. He has a team of 8 and they have zero consistent staff meetings.

Wait, what? No consistent staff meetings?

He said his son, who is his heir apparent, keeps pushing him to put a consistent meeting on the calendar but he pushes back. Why?

Because he’s learned that if you consistently hold the time, you will consistently come up with stuff to fill the time.

In his firm, everyone knows what to do. They each know their role. They execute their role daily and only get together when absolutely needed, given that meeting together takes them away from execution of their role.

This got me thinking…why do we meet? What’s the point of gathering a group of people in a room for a period of time? It’s an expensive gathering, if you calculate the total cost of the salaries in the room at any given time. Why do it?

That I can see, there are really only a few value-adds to meeting:

1. Alignment around topics

2. Brainstorming and tapping diverse expertise

3. Teambuilding, because teamwork makes the dream work

4. Clarity on assignments for projects or division of labor

The problem is, someone somewhere at some time determined that meetings should either be in 60- or 90-minute lengths. And that they should be regularly scheduled. And so we find things to fill the time.

I’m not a disbeliever in meetings. I’m a believer in productivity. If we don’t need to meet, let’s not meet.

So what does this hedge fund manager do when he needs to talk to his team? He asks everyone to get together for a few minutes in the afternoon for a quick meeting.
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In other words, they meet when meeting moves the work along and they don’t meet when it would get in the way.