Meetings Are the Hidden Lever of Organizational Speed

Most companies treat meetings as a necessary evil--a cost of doing business. Paul English argues they’re actually a strategic lever, one that when optimized, creates disproportionate gains in speed, morale, and competitive advantage. The non-obvious implication? Your meeting culture isn’t just a symptom of dysfunction; it’s the root cause. Poorly run meetings don’t just waste time--they erode trust, dilute decision-making, and silently cap your organization’s ceiling. Leaders who treat meetings as trivial overlook the compounding cost: not just $870 billion in lost U.S. productivity, but the slow decay of psychological safety and ownership. This post is for executives, team leads, and high-leverage contributors who suspect their calendars are running their companies. The advantage? Clarity. Energy. And the ability to move faster than peers who remain trapped in the meeting grind.

Why the Obvious Fixes Fail--And What Actually Works

Most attempts to fix meetings target surface symptoms: no meeting Fridays, agendas, shorter durations. But these are band-aids on a systemic issue. The real problem isn’t the format--it’s the underlying incentives and unexamined assumptions about what meetings are for. Paul English doesn’t just advocate for better meetings; he reframes them as the central nervous system of organizational intelligence. When designed right, meetings become decision engines, relationship builders, and culture carriers. When left unmanaged, they become tax on progress.

The first non-obvious insight is this: bad meeting culture is a leadership failure, not a coordination problem. English recalls being untrained as a young manager, despite spending hours in meetings weekly. “No one ever trained me how to run a meeting,” he says. And yet, companies spend millions on tools and training for everything except this core function. The result? Mid-level managers equate activity with output. Scheduling a meeting feels like leadership. But as English observes, “Mid-level management thinks that their job is to run meetings and they put a meeting on people's calendar and they feel good like I'm getting work done.” This creates a self-reinforcing loop: more meetings → less time for real work → more meetings to catch up → deeper fatigue.

This is where conventional wisdom collapses. Telling teams to “have agendas” or “end on time” doesn’t address the root driver: the lack of accountability for meeting quality. Without a mechanism to audit and improve, every fix leaks. English’s approach at Kayak was surgical: he treated meetings like code reviews. He’d walk by glass-walled rooms, assess group size, and intervene. “There’s not like one or two of you smart enough to do that? Like you need 10 of you?” That public scrutiny shifted norms. It wasn’t about shaming--it was about signaling that meetings were important enough to be scrutinized.

"I also at one point bought a mechanical attendance clicker like they have at county fairs where you count how many people going into the big tent or whatever and I'd hang them outside each meeting room. Not that we would literally count the people, but it's a visual reminder when you walk by the meeting room that someone's paying attention."

-- Paul English

The clicker wasn’t functional--it was symbolic. It created a feedback loop: if too many people gathered, someone noticed. That simple act of observation changed behavior. Over time, large meetings became socially costly. The system responded by routing around inefficiency.

The second layer of consequence is psychological. Meetings aren’t just about decisions--they’re about relationships. English argues that every meeting has two goals: “Come to good decisions quickly” and “improve the relationships with the people in the room.” Most organizations optimize for the first and ignore the second. But the real payoff comes from the interplay. When people feel heard, they engage. When they engage, decisions gain velocity. When decisions gain velocity, momentum builds.

This is where the “meeting after the meeting” becomes toxic. When real decisions happen in backchannels, it signals that the formal process is performative. Trust erodes. English acknowledges pre-meetings can be useful for change management--“pre-selling” big decisions to opinion leaders--but warns against normalization. “If you do that continually, I think that can actually damage morale.” The hidden cost? A bifurcated culture: insiders who shape outcomes, and outsiders who execute them.

The third and most counterintuitive insight: decentralizing authority in meetings creates faster, higher-quality outcomes. At Kayak, English would assign action items to junior staff during meetings. “That’s an awesome insight--can you go and redesign how we should do that and bring it back to the team?” This wasn’t delegation; it was cultural engineering. By pushing decisions down, he created ownership. By acting on ideas in real time, he rewarded initiative. The result? Meetings weren’t just forums for discussion--they became launchpads for action.

This connects to a deeper systems principle: the fewer people involved in creation, the higher the innovation yield. “Nothing was ever invented with 10 people in a room,” English insists. “There’s too many people who can say no.” Small groups--two or three--allow for rapid iteration and psychological safety. That’s why he champions improv training: to teach teams how to say “yes, and...” instead of “but.” The meeting becomes a sandbox, not a courtroom.

Amazon’s six-page memo practice exemplifies this. By banning PowerPoint and requiring narrative memos read in silence at the start of meetings, they shift from presentation to dialogue. Everyone arrives prepared. The meeting begins where most end: at the decision point. This isn’t just efficiency--it’s a cultural statement. Thinking is valued over performance. Depth over polish.

"Jeff Bezos sent out the famous email to his team saying no more PowerPoint and you have to write a six-page memo that you read ahead of time. So by the time the meeting starts, everyone's up to speed and you get to work immediately."

-- Paul English

The downstream effect? Faster alignment, fewer follow-ups, and higher-quality decisions. But the real advantage is time-based: this system rewards patience. Writing a memo takes longer upfront. Silent reading feels awkward. But over months, the compounding benefit is clarity. Meanwhile, companies stuck in slide decks cycle through revisions, misalignment, and re-meetings.

Hybrid work adds another layer. English observes that the worst hybrid setup is when some are in a room and others remote--with cameras pointed at a group. “You’ll look at a Zoom meeting with five tiles and one of them is 10 people in it. You can’t see who those 10 people are.” His fix? “Make all the people in the room together each have their laptop open.” This equalizes presence. It’s a small change with outsized impact: remote participants gain parity. The system treats all nodes equally.

This reveals a broader truth: the best meeting cultures are those where leaders actively shape the feedback loops. English didn’t wait for surveys. He watched. He intervened. He modeled. He measured--by percentage of meetings he initiated, by frequency of early endings. He created rituals that reinforced values.

Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, captured the stakes when English pitched him meeting software: “If you just randomly deleted half my meetings, I’ll pay you whatever you want.” That’s not hyperbole. It’s recognition that the bottleneck isn’t strategy--it’s coordination cost. The companies that win aren’t those with the best ideas, but those that can execute them fastest. And execution speed is a function of meeting hygiene.

Key Action Items

• Audit your meeting load quarterly: As a leader, review your calendar monthly. Ask: What percent of meetings did I initiate? Which recurring meetings can be reduced to monthly or quarterly? Which can become async updates? Target a 30% reduction in standing meetings over the next 90 days.

• Institute a “no agenda, no meeting” rule--and enforce it: If a meeting lacks a clear decision goal or pre-read, cancel it. For major discussions, require a written memo (even one page) distributed 24 hours in advance. This pays off in 3-6 months as decision latency drops.

• End meetings early--routinely: If the goal is achieved in 20 minutes, end it. Return time to the team. This builds trust and signals respect for focus work. Discomfort: it feels abrupt. Advantage: over time, it trains teams to be concise.

• Assign ownership during meetings, not after: When someone contributes a valuable idea, assign them to develop it. “That’s a great point--can you own drafting the next version?” This creates immediate accountability and reinforces psychological safety. Flag: junior staff may hesitate. Support them.

• Optimize hybrid equity: In any hybrid meeting, require every in-room participant to join via individual laptop. This ensures remote voices see and are seen equally. Implement immediately--it’s a one-time policy shift with lasting impact.

• Survey team sentiment on meetings anonymously every six months: Ask: “What percent of your meetings feel like a waste of time?” and “Do you believe real decisions happen in this meeting or after?” Track trends. This creates data to justify cultural change.

• Train managers on facilitation, not just content: Most leaders are promoted for expertise, not leadership skill. Invest in training on how to run meetings--balancing voices, managing conflict, closing with clarity. This pays off in 12-18 months as team velocity increases.