Meetings are never the part of our list of ‘nicest and most memorable events.’ Who am I kidding! Meetings are terrible, and half of the times, they are not even useful. At least Elon Musk agrees with me on this one. The man has his hands digging deep into a whole bunch of things. He starts from electric cars and solar technologies but goes deep into the earth as a boring company and out in the skies to the red planet. It is hard to imagine one person even looking at a ton of things, and undoubtedly, Musk has an exhausting schedule. Each second of such a person’s time is precious, and Musk does not want to waste even a single moment in a useless meeting.
A former Tesla employee related a story of one such meeting. He writes,
“One of my close friends started there a couple years before me. He worked (and still does) in an analysis group, so meetings made less sense when you could just walk over and ask someone a question. He told me a story one time (this is paraphrased).
“Elon to a meeting member: ‘You haven’t said anything. Why are you in here?'”
His friend then explained the reason behind such a comment saying,
“That may be borderline rude, but it makes sense. Don’t be in a meeting unless there’s a purpose for it; either to make a decision, or get people up to speed. In most cases, an email will suffice.”
For a person juggling in so many companies, it makes perfect sense to give importance to each second of other people’s time. Musk certainly is not the only one who does that. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, has his own two pizza rule that helps to make meetings more productive. Bezos also told Fortune that the best way to make a meeting productive is by handing out a memo at the beginning before any discussion begins.
Maybe it is this trait of valuing each moment of your time that brings people to the peak of success where they have the power to make a difference to millions of people. It is rightly said that time flies!
