A lot of time and money is wasted on unnecessary corporate meetings. Since the early days of Amazon , Jeff Bezos has taken a unique approach to meetings.

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At a management offsite in the late 1990s, a team of well-intentioned junior executives stood up before top brass and gave a presentation on a problem indigenous to all large organizations: the difficulty of coordinating far-flung divisions. The junior executives recommended a variety of different techniques to foster cross group dialogue and afterward seemed proud of their own ingenuity. Then Jeff Bezos, his face red, and the blood vessel in his forehead pulsating, spoke up.

“I understand what you are saying, but you are completely wrong,” he said.

“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”

…At that meeting and in public speeches afterward, vowed to run Amazon with an emphasis on decentralization and independent decision-making. “A hierarchy isn’t responsive enough to change,” he said. “I’m still trying to get people to do occasionally what I ask. And if I was successful, maybe we wouldn’t have the right kind of company.

Bezos’s counter intuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them. That would come to represent something akin to the conventional wisdom in the high-tech industry over the next decade. The companies that embraced this philosophy, like Google, Amazon, and, later, Facebook, were in part drawing lessons from theories about lean and agile software development. In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress. One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.

When you do have a meeting, make it useful

Of course, some meetings are necessary. There is value to cross-pollination of thoughts among intelligent people. Some processes do require explicit coordination and discussion. However, in practice, many hours are wasted on routine updates, grandstanding, and “thinking out loud”. To ensure meetings were productive Bezos required the person who leads a meeting to write detailed prose explaining their thoughts. The first half hour or so of every meeting would be silent reading time. This ensured everyone thought deeply and expressed complete thoughts cogently.

Meetings no longer started with someone standing up and commanding the floor as they had previously at Amazon and everywhere else throughout the corporate land. Instead, the narratives were passed out and everyone sat quietly reading the document for fifteen minutes—or longer. At the beginning, there was no page limit, an omission that Diego Piacentini recalled as “painful” and that led to several weeks of employees churning out papers as long as sixty pages. Quickly there was a supplemental decree: a six-page limit on narratives, with additional room for footnotes.