Companies audit travel expenses to the decimal and let the calendar, where the actual money goes, run feral. Multiply salaries by meeting hours in any organization and the figure dwarfs most line items that receive obsessive scrutiny. It is the least managed spend in business, and everyone involved knows it.
The standard critique blames culture or tooling. The honest diagnosis is simpler: most recurring meetings are insurance policies written in other people's time. The status meeting insures the manager against surprise. The alignment meeting insures the presenter against later blame. The kickoff insures everyone against the accusation of not having been consulted. Fear, not collaboration, is the booking engine.
This is why calendar-hygiene campaigns fail on schedule. Declaring a no-meeting Wednesday without removing the underlying fear simply compresses the insurance-buying into Thursday. The organizations that have actually cut meeting load did it by changing what is safe: decisions documented in writing, dissent solicited asynchronously, and, critically, leaders who visibly declined to punish the unconsulted decision that turned out fine.
The rebuilt middle-management layer will determine whether this improves, because managers set the local price of candor. A team's meeting calendar is a map of what its people are afraid of. Read yours accordingly, and cancel from the fear down, not the calendar down.
The governance version is the same failure at a higher altitude, where the board meeting has been optimised for the comfortable transmission of information rather than for judgment.
That shift follows earlier coverage of the Case for Hiring Slowly in a Fast Market and Companies Track Time and Waste Attention, Which Is the Only Scarce One.
