This being the season of New Year’s resolutions , Shopify’s chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian has declared war on meetings: in 2023, there will be no staff meetings of more than two people. Meetings will be completely banned on Wednesdays. In the absolute need of a meeting of more than 50 people, these will be restricted to Thursdays between 11am and 5pm. The aim is to delete 10,000 events, and save the Canadian e-commerce group 76,500 hours to do real work. Honourable, you might say. But also probably futile, like most New Year’s resolutions, however keen Nejatian is to lift productivity and boost company profits. The idea is also hardly novel. I recall fondly the famous 1976 John Cleese management training film , Meetings Bloody Meetings, which has Cleese lying in bed next to his wife, doing office work. She asks why he doesn’t do his work at work. Cleese irritably responds: “There isn’t time. I have to go to meetings … First apologising for being late because I have been kept at the previous meeting, and then leaving early, making arrangements to meet again to finish the meeting in order to get to the next meeting. This continues until I leave work, when at last I can start work.” With companies worldwide under relentless pressure to improve productivity, meetings are an obvious target. Management consultants estimate that in the US alone, companies hold 55 million meetings a day, wasting at least 24 billion working hours every year, with losses estimated at US$37 billion a year. These are such colossal numbers that, accurate or not, they are attracting a lot of attention – enlivened by the Covid-related phenomena of home-working, and the considerable community that has become so happily used to working in shorts at the kitchen table that they are not just reluctant to join meetings, but to turn up at the workplace at all. After a 45-year working lifetime of far too many meetings, I can sympathise with the scepticism. Perhaps the most epic waste of 300 people’s time that I can recall was an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) meeting to discuss the new policy partnership on science, technology and innovation. At the start of the meeting, on a giant screen above us, appeared a projection of a draft mission statement. Eight hours later, the draft was still there, twice as long, and multicoloured by edits from large numbers of Apec’s 21-member-economy representatives. At the time, I pencilled the cost of locking 50 of the Apec region’s most senior and highly paid government officials, together with an army of less-senior officials and mesmerised observers from businesses like myself, into this tedious subeditorial process. My estimate was around US$1.5 million. Matters became comically surreal as Chinese and Korean representatives began arguing over the English-language syntax as the statement sprawled. I can imagine similar costly, mind-numbing processes accompanying the crescendo of the COP27 or G20 meetings. There were obviously infinitely superior ways of drafting the mission statement, but that would have missed the theatre of it all. And there is an important issue: perhaps one of the most crucial elements of a meeting is the theatre. Take Elon Musk launching a new Tesla, or Warren Buffett – legendary chief of Berkshire Hathaway – presenting at his annual meeting. Or, from painful personal experience, that special “criticism meeting” at the China Daily back in 1982 (I was seconded there to train some economic journalists) when a subeditor was solemnly boiled alive for accidentally placing a photo of Mt Everest over a caption referring to a then-illustrious Chinese leader. Normally, the theatre is less dramatic or consequential, but it is theatre nevertheless. It is about the exertion of power and seniority. It is about giving voice to the bright-young-things in the nursery slopes of senior leadership. And, for the many who sit dutifully silent, it is about learning company culture, mentorship and inclusion. At their best, meetings can be a wonder to behold. I will always cherish the daily editorial conferences at the Financial Times, always at 10.30am and rarely longer than 30 minutes: first, a review of the papers that morning, mainly what we had missed or misinterpreted; then each page editor identifying news priorities for the edition ahead; then agreement on the day’s major opinion pieces and editorials. Everyone there had a clear role. No one messed in other people’s business. Everyone emerged with clarity over the 100,000-or-so words that would land on subeditors’ desks in eight hours time. I will also cherish the meeting regime orchestrated by Anne Forrest, once-revered CEO of the communications group Forrest International. She introduced me for the first time to the concept of the company as a family, with more values than just the bottom line. Remote working is good for productivity, so why don’t bosses believe it? The company’s weekly meeting – manageable because there were barely 30 of us – included every employee, even office support with nothing directly to do with clients or income generation. Before earnings and workflow were discussed, birthdays were celebrated and new arrivals introduced. I remember them as happy and informative, with huge participation. In short, meetings need not be “bloody meetings”, and Kaz Nejatian’s Shopify may be losing more than it gains. What are the odds that Wednesday meetings will be back sooner than he thinks? David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades