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Meetings are primarily a tool for those with formal authority to corral productive people to ensure that their power structure is preserved. It's painfully self

Meetings are primarily a tool for those with formal authority to corral productive people to ensure that their power structure is preserved. It's painfully self-evident, when someone who is very productive, who people naturally follow and listen to, but who has no formal authority, is at odds with management. That just cannot stand, and management will sabotage its own natural leaders by undermining them, to ensure that their own jobs and authority are safe. The fact that this author views meetings as "the work" exemplifies this. Yes, "the work" of flattening any emergent self-organization. If this author's premise were correct, startups could never succeed if they didn't possess a significant bureaucratic layer from the inception. But it's not correct, and startups succeed (outside of external factors) due to self-organizing and talented people who spend their time building and improving products. >My own journey through these ideas started with the puzzle: why do groups of smart people often act with such apparently low collective intelligence? Because they're being corralled into amorphous blobs where any natural structure and interaction is destroyed! That's like asking why a neural network doesn't predict handwritten numbers very well when you restructure the neurons yourself by hand.

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
One interesting thing about startups is that they’re often made intentionally inefficient in later funding rounds. It gets really weird when you go from a very fast an lightweight team of contributors into a corporate structure that gets dictated by VCs. All of the sudden, you find yourself in meetings with layers of management. In the worst cases I’ve experienced, a bunch of non-technical people spend hours “brainstorming” how to solve problems that are trivial to resolve, because they do not have the depth to know that these things do not really require any discussion. In my opinion, meetings with non-technical managers should only be organized for strategic planning. All tactical meetings should be covered between contributors, as needed. If you can’t implement a solution, you really don’t have much to contribute in that discussion, and your presence is counterproductive for the company. And exactly as you say, the people who inject themselves into this part of the process are destroying the natural leadership that would emerge.

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago

One interesting thing about startups is that they’re often made intentionally inefficient in later funding rounds. It gets really weird when you go from a very fast an lightweight team of contributors into a corporate structure that gets dictated by VCs. All of the sudden, you find yourself in meetings with layers of management. In the worst cases I’ve experienced, a bunch of non-technical people spend hours “brainstorming” how to solve problems that are trivial to resolve, because they do not have the depth to know that these things do not really require any discussion. In my opinion, meetings with non-technical managers should only be organized for strategic planning. All tactical meetings should be covered between contributors, as needed. If you can’t implement a solution, you really don’t have much to contribute in that discussion, and your presence is counterproductive for the company. And exactly as you say, the people who inject themselves into this part of the process are destroying the natural leadership that would emerge.