Homework before hand is an anti pattern IMO. It assumes people aren’t busy in the rest of their day and the meeting scheduler is inflating the toll of the meeting with a hidden prep tax. This is how people end up with 12 hour days.

Bezos forbade pre-meeting homework at Amazon for this reason. He was having a hard time keeping up with everything and the meetings were basically people recriminating each other for not being prepared then having to take up the first part of the meeting with catching everyone up anyways. So he structured meetings at Amazon as an introductory period of reading so everyone was always on the same page once discussion began. No slideshows, just reading a document of n pages where n is less than 6.

I personally find the high level IC pseudomanager role sad. I went back to IC to be closer to the metal. But the expectation is I’ll be a product manager, program manager, and people manager all in one while the focused roles work in a self limited silo.

All bezos did was explicitly make the homework a required part of calling a meeting. Correctly putting the majority of the prep work on the person calling the meeting to begin with.

Then they simply moved the implied 20-30 minute prep time everyone should be doing anyways into the meeting block itself.

If a meeting isn’t important enough to prep materials or an agenda for the meeting should be canceled.

My theory is all standing scheduled regular meetings are basically useless. If I run a startup again they will be outright banned for my org. Meetings about a specific topic or issue are different.

I might disagree on this. For a meeting that covers any moderately complex situation to be productive, the attendees need to understand the context. That sounds like what Bezos was after. Doing “homework” beforehand ensures that people aren’t sitting idly while one person is reading the report for the first time or otherwise trying to bring themselves up to speed on the context everyone else already knows. I don’t think that’s the best use of everyone’s time, unless you expect meetings to be the primary objective of those attendees. It sounds to me that leadership should be delegating decisions to people who understand the context rather than spending time at every meeting going over background. Of course, that only works well in high-trust environments.