Summary

Andy Grove called meetings the medium of managerial work. Bad meetings are a design failure, and the fix is better design. Give every meeting an output, keep the regular cadence strong so that special meetings stay rare, move status updates into writing, and open every invite with IDOARRT. Then have the courage to cancel any meeting that has nothing to produce.

Why we hate what we need most

Ask any manager what clogs their calendar and the answer comes fast. Meetings. They are the punchline of office jokes and the thing people apologise for when they send another invite.

Take them away and the organisation falls apart. Projects drift. People lose context. Without meetings there is no shared reality, only isolated effort.

We need meetings, and we do not know how to run them. Andy Grove, who led Intel, put it more sharply in High Output Management:

“Meetings are the medium of managerial work.”

He meant it literally. A painter works with colour and a coder with code. A manager works with meetings. They are not a break from the real work. They are the work.

A manager’s output is the output of the team. The way a manager shapes it, by aligning priorities, transferring knowledge, solving problems, and motivating people, is structured conversation. So the task is to take meetings back.