Your business philosophy?

[Bogie]

Emails, meetings and reports are generally not a work product. Think hard before requesting that any subordinates, who are actually producing for the company, are forced to become involved.

[Boomhauer]

Elon Musk feels the same way and gives his employees blanket permission to walk out of pointless meetings.

[HankB]

When you work for a multinational company with subs in both Europe and Asia, your meetings aren't just confined to normal working hours, sometimes teleconferences can be scheduled any time from dawn to dusk.

Most are unproductive. Some are scheduled by managers who, having been recently divorced, have no more homelife and seemingly just want something to do in the evening.

 

[RoadKingLarry]

When you work for a multinational company with subs in both Europe and Asia, your meetings aren't just confined to normal working hours, sometimes teleconferences can be scheduled any time from dawn to dusk.

Most are unproductive. Some are scheduled by managers who, having been recently divorced, have no more homelife and seemingly just want something to do in the evening.

 

And 99% of them could have been handled by an email.

[HankB]

And 99% of them could have been handled by an email.

+1000

[Unisaw]

1) Keep things as simple as possible.  For example, there is no need to offer every bell and whistle in the way of employee benefits, each of which will have to be administered, amended when the rules change, etc.  Just pay your people enough.
2) Employee turnover is expensive.   Pay your people enough.
3) Learn to say no so you can focus on what’s really important.
4) Keep the number of employees to a minimum necessary to get the important stuff done.
5) If no one has your back, move your back.
6) It’s better to leave a little money on the table than to sacrifice your integrity.

[tokugawa]

Do what you said you will do,
 when you said you would do it,
 for the price you agreed to do it for.

 

[Hawkmoon]

Emails, meetings and reports are generally not a work product. Think hard before requesting that any subordinates, who are actually producing for the company, are forced to become involved.

Forced to become involved in what?

[RocketMan]

I worked for a company that often held a pre-meeting to plan an upcoming meeting.  These meetings were usually set by one of the mechanical engineers that apparently was taught that's how things are done.  And most of the meeting content could have been covered by email or brief face-to-face chats by the concerned parties.

[zxcvbob]

Forced to become involved in what?

Forced to attend useless meetings and write useless reports.  (they can ignore the emails, and the productive workers do for most part)

[grampster]

We had a new Vice President of Field Operations who had never had any experience of actually being in the field or knowing anything about how the sale and retention of our products actually worked in the real world.

He requested all of us General Agents (insurance) to provide him with a detailed accounting about how we would seek to meet the goals of our company for sales and retention in our agencies; Ie a Business Plan.

I sent mine in thusly.  "I shall wake up in the morning, do my ablutions, pull on my pants and come to my office and see what happens."
My partner sent the same message.  Neither of us got a peep out of the idiot during the 6 months he was around...after which he disappeared.

[Bogie]

I have done a bunch of meetings about... a meeting... It was about 1,200 researchers, and the board was myself and about 4-5 other guys...
 
Yeah, those were meetings that had *expletive deleted*it getting DONE. Had one of the upper middle guys show up once, and he was sitting there, and one of the retirees who was always brought back for planning just flat out asked him why he was there, and told him we needed to make stuff happen, so he could either get his hands dirty, provide ideas, or get out of the way. Didn't see him again...