- Caterina Fake, the co-founder of photo sharing site Flckr and currently runs Hunch a Web start-up and "decision engine." She has pretty strong feelings about meetings and they're not positive. "Interaction should be constant, not crammed into meetings once a week. At Hunch, we don't have meetings unless absolutely necessary. When I used to have meetings, though, this is how I would do it: There would be an agenda distributed before the meeting. Everybody would stand. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone would drink 16 ounces of water. We would discuss everything on the agenda, make all the decisions that needed to be made, and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom."
- Similarly, Mark Cuban, an entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks sees meetings as a waste of time. He runs his whole business via e-mail and estimates that it saves him "five to 10 hours per day. No meetings. No phone calls. Everything is documented so the number of "let's talk again," or "get together to clarify," or "get on the same page" are gone. People learn very quickly to document and get to the point without the "intonation" of trying to sell me that occurs in meetings. I'm a Dragnet type of e-mail guy. Nothing but the facts. Leave the BS for other people."
- At the end of his company's all-staff meetings, which are held every Monday, Justin Kan, the co-founder of Justin.tv makes sure people haven't been spacing out, and sometimes even he comes up short. "At the end [of the meeting], Mike, my co-founder and our CEO, gives everyone a quiz based on his notes from the meeting. It's just a fun thing, to test yourself and see if you're paying attention. Sometimes, I'll get five out of five answers right; other times, I might get two out of five."
Dig Deeper: America's Most Productive CEOs
