The Tuesday status meeting has outlived its founder. The manager who created it left the company in March; the meeting continues, owned by no one, attended by eleven, useful to approximately zero. Ask why it exists and the answers are archaeological, someone once needed visibility, some launch once went wrong. The meeting is not doing work. It is commemorating work that was once done.
Recurring meetings deserve to be read as symptoms. A standing coordination ritual is usually a patch over one of two missing structures: nobody knows who decides, so everyone must be assembled to decide together, or nobody wrote anything down, so information can only travel by being spoken. Both defects generate managers, because someone must host the patch. Fix the defects and a surprising fraction of the hosting evaporates.
Defect one: nobody knows who decides
Bain research published in Harvard Business Review by Rogers and Blenko surveyed more than 350 global organizations and found only about 15% practicing effective decision-making. Their diagnosis was ambiguity: decisions stall in predictable tugs-of-war (global versus local, center versus business unit, function versus function) because no one can say who holds the final call. Their remedy, the RAPID framework, is essentially a naming ceremony: for each decision, one person recommends, named people give input or must agree, one person decides, others perform.
Notice what this does to the meeting count. A meeting whose true agenda is "we are all here because none of us is authorized to proceed alone" simply dissolves once authority has an address. The decider consults whom she needs, asynchronously, and decides. The weekly assembly of the uncertain was never coordination; it was a search party for a missing signature.
Defect two: nobody wrote it down
The second meeting-generator is oral culture. GitLab, the all-remote software company, states the principle bluntly in its public handbook: asynchronous work is impossible without strong documentation, because otherwise every follow-up question blocks someone for hours or days. GitLab's answer is handbook-first operation, a living public document that would run past 2,000 printed pages, where decisions, processes and context live by default. Its people can self-serve answers instead of convening to transmit them by voice. This is a company assertion, case evidence rather than a controlled result, but the mechanism is plain: every fact that exists only in speech must be re-spoken, and meetings are where re-speaking happens on a schedule.
An organization that documents by default discovers that the status meeting was a human RSS feed, the kickoff was a settings file, and the weekly sync was a queue of questions that a searchable page answers at 2 a.m. without convening anyone.
The credential that couldn't run a meeting
There is an irony Ricardo Semler enjoys about who is presumed to be good at this hosting work. As he has told it, Semco had factories effectively run by engineers without diplomas, and a maintenance technician leading two hundred people because everyone trusted him, while MBAs from excellent schools proved unable to run a meeting. The point is not anti-education. It is that meeting-running was treated as the manager's core competence, and it turned out to be neither teachable by credential nor, more importantly, necessary in the volume assumed. Much of what the meeting host coordinates, adults can coordinate directly, if the structure lets them.
Zero-based calendars
The practical discipline is to treat every recurring meeting as guilty until proven necessary, and to charge it rent. Twice a year, delete the standing calendar and let meetings re-justify their existence with a named owner, a decision they exist to make, and a reason the same outcome cannot be reached with a document plus a deadline for objections. Meetings that reconvene under that test are real. The rest were furniture.
The deeper yield is not the reclaimed hours, though those are considerable. It is what the exercise reveals about the management layer itself. When decision rights are explicit and knowledge is written, the coordination that filled a manager's week shrinks toward a part-time duty a team can rotate. The meeting that could have been an email was, all along, the smaller finding. The larger one is the job that could have been a document.
Sources
- Rogers & Blenko (2006). Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance. Harvard Business Review / Bain. Survey of 350+ organizations: only ~15% practice effective decision-making; RAPID assigns named decision roles. https://www.bain.com/insights/who-has-the-d/
- GitLab (accessed 2026). Asynchronous work, all-remote handbook. Async work requires documentation-first operation; GitLab's public handbook exceeds 2,000 printed pages. https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/asynchronous/