Matt Mullenweg Quotes

Corporate America is drowning in meetings. To make one thing clear, I am not against communication. Quick one-on-ones can be extremely effective. I am talking about those hour-long recurring meetings, devoid of a clear agenda, and attended by many. I dread them.

Meetings get a bad rap, and deservedly so - most are disorganized and distracted. But they can be a critical tool for getting your team on the same page.

I am very lucky in my team. They sit opposite me, and I get to see them every day sitting there staring at the seating chart, not doing much. It is almost like a chess game.

In France, we have a mania for meetings that start very early and finish very late. It wastes time and creates rigidity in schedules. Everyone knows I hate long meetings.

Maybe because I've worked in the BBC for so long I am completely allergic to meetings.

The best way I know to get good work out of people is to create a good environment so that people have a good experience. I try to always hold up my own end by being prepared.

The majority of meetings should be discussions that lead to decisions.

Chemistry's a word that people who make hires and decisions say, 'Hey, you guys go out and work on your chemistry!'

I try not to schedule too many meetings. That's one of the things I learned in corporate America - that you can spend your days having meetings and never actually have time to work.

Meetings should be like salt - a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.

The guy I've never worked with that is pissing me off is Tom Hanks. I want to work with Tom Hanks more than anyone.

Our approach is to think of companies not as businesses but as collections of people. We [Apple]want to qualitatively change the way people work. We don't just want to help them do word processing faster or add numbers faster. We want to change the way they can communicate with one another. We're seeing less paper flying around and more quality of communication.

The usefulness of a meeting is in inverse proportion to the attendance.

If you don't have a cohesive team, you won't have good results.

People don't realise how difficult it is to work with people day in and day out that know absolutely nothing.

I think you function much better when you trust people and when you've got a sort of relationship where you can develop ideas within a framework.

As far as I'm concerned, I enjoy what I do, I enjoy the competition, working with a group of people to get the best out of them.

I enjoy the company and interaction of people at work.

As a leader, I believe it's important to have an open door with your staff. Those who want to learn and to grow in their careers will walk through that door and into your life. I encourage people to come and seek me out at 'Frontline' with good ideas, curiosity, and drive.

I think I can contribute to the team in a multitude of ways.

If you are building a corporate culture of greatness, you have to define culture on your own terms and with the people you work with.

I never accepted the premise that meetings themselves were bad.

Meetings are usually terrible, but they shouldn't be.

Because when you work with a different team, the expectations are different and then you deliver in a very different way. You look back at it and you're proud of yourself. And when the same people come in and you do the same thing, it's boring. You could re-envision it again and again but when the new chemistry of ideas comes in, something happens as a team.

One of the things that is always difficult about a collaboration is that you don't necessarily find the same thing funny. And so the challenge becomes, how do you tell the other person that you don't think something's funny? The best collaborations tend to be when you are willing to be told that. But there's also ego involved, and so there's a lot of frustration in knowing that you're writing something, and the other person, on some level, needs to think that it's funny.