Your Meetings Are Lying To You

This week, Alex and Emily are discussing one of the most normalized and quietly costly dynamics inside executive teams: meeting culture. They dig into why most organizations spend the bulk of their meeting time in passive information-sharing sessions, and how little of that time translates into actual decisions or forward movement. Drawing on Peter Drucker’s blunt assessment of meetings as a symptom of organizational dysfunction, they explore the critical difference between status-update meetings and structured work sessions and why getting that ratio right changes everything.

The conversation also covers the mechanics that drain productive time without anyone noticing: default sixty-minute blocks, recurring meetings that outlive their purpose, and formats that reward presence over output. Alex and Emily walk through the case for Creative Problem Solving as a framework for running work sessions that actually produce results, and they connect the dots between dysfunctional meeting culture and the kind of sustained depletion that sets executives up for burnout. If your calendar feels like a treadmill lately, this one is for you.