You've been in this meeting. Everyone has. It was supposed to be a quick alignment call — thirty minutes, tops. An hour and a half later, you're still on it. A dozen people, all talking, nobody deciding anything. You do the math in your head on what this call is costing per minute and it makes your stomach turn a little.
I keep finding myself in these moments. Sitting on a call, watching people talk in circles, nobody pulling the trigger on anything — and wondering: am I the only one who thinks this is insane?
The Meeting That Could've Been an Email
Everyone jokes about this. "That meeting could've been an email." It's a meme at this point. But I don't think people appreciate how much damage it's actually doing. Not just to productivity — to the quality of the work itself.
Here's a pattern I've seen play out at every company I've worked at: someone needs a deliverable. A proposal, a strategy deck, a project plan. Instead of one person with clear thinking owning it, it becomes a committee project. A dozen people get invited to a "working session." Everyone has input. Nobody has authority. The thing gets wordsmithed by group consensus until it says absolutely nothing. Then someone schedules a follow-up to review the watered-down version. Then another follow-up to finalize. Three weeks and four meetings later, you have something that a single person with a clear head could have produced in an afternoon.
And here's the part that keeps me up at night — nobody seems bothered by this. It's just how things work. It's "the process."
The Cost of Not Deciding
Companies obsess over making the right decision. They'll burn weeks and thousands of dollars in collective salary trying to de-risk a choice. But here's what nobody seems to account for: not deciding has a cost too. And it's almost always higher than making the wrong call.
Think about it. You make a bad decision — you find out it's wrong in a week, you pivot, you adjust. You lost a week. Not great, but you learned something and you're moving again. You make no decision? You lose that same week, plus the next one, plus the one after that. You learn nothing. You're standing still and paying full price for it.
The best leaders I've worked with understand this intuitively. They make the call with 70% of the information, commit, and course-correct as they go. The worst ones schedule another meeting to gather the remaining 30% — which, by the way, they never actually get. That last 30% is a mirage. You're never going to have perfect information. But you can always make another decision tomorrow.
Mistakes aren't the enemy. They're data. Every wrong turn tells you something the analysis never could have. The people who avoid mistakes at all costs are the ones who never ship anything. They're still in the conference room debating font sizes while someone else already launched.
One Person, Clear Direction, Right Tools
Here's what I keep coming back to. One person with clear intent and the right tools can outpace a committee. That's not a hot take — it's just math. One person doesn't need to schedule a meeting. Doesn't need alignment. Doesn't need to wordsmith by consensus. They sit down, they think, they produce.
AI makes this gap embarrassing. I've seen a single person with a clear vision and the right AI tools produce a better strategy document in thirty minutes than a team of ten produced in a week of back-and-forth. Not because the team was dumb — they weren't. Because the process was broken. Groupthink doesn't produce clarity. It produces compromise. And compromise is the enemy of anything good.
The tools we have now reward decisive thinking. You have to know what you want. You have to be able to articulate a direction. AI doesn't do well with "let's explore some options and circle back." It does incredibly well with "here's what I need, here's the context, here's the audience — go." That's not a limitation. That's a feature. It forces the kind of clear thinking that committees are designed to avoid.
Is Everyone Just Winging It?
I'm going to say something that might sound arrogant, but I genuinely want to know: is this how it works everywhere? Because from where I sit, corporate America has built a system that rewards visibility over output. If you're in meetings all day, you must be important. If you're collaborating with twelve stakeholders, you must be thorough. If it took three weeks, it must have been complex. None of that is necessarily true. But it's how the game is scored.
I don't think it's anyone's fault, really. It's just the system that evolved. And I've realized that's just not how I'm built. I don't want to play that game. I want to solve the problem. Give me the problem, give me the tools, and get out of the way. That's how I'm wired. And I think a lot of people feel the same way but don't say it — because calling it out means questioning the whole structure. It's easier to sit through the meeting, nod at the right moments, and do the real work afterward on your own time.
Moving Fast Isn't Reckless
There's this perception that moving fast means being careless. That if you didn't spend weeks deliberating, you must not have thought it through. But speed and quality aren't opposites. In my experience, they're correlated. The best work I've ever done was produced quickly, with focus, in a flow state — not after weeks of committee review.
Moving fast means making a decision with the information you have. It means shipping something and seeing how it performs in the real world instead of theorizing about it in a conference room. It means treating mistakes as part of the process, not as failures to be avoided at all costs. You're going to get things wrong. That's not a bug — it's how it works. The question isn't whether you'll make mistakes. It's how fast you'll recognize them, learn from them, and adjust.
The builders who win right now are the ones who decide, commit, execute, and iterate. Not the ones who analyze, align, review, and discuss. The gap between those two approaches has always existed. AI just made it impossible to ignore.
Maybe I'm Wrong
Look — maybe I'm the crazy one. Maybe the committees and the working sessions and the follow-up meetings serve a purpose I'm not appreciating. Maybe there's some organizational wisdom in having twelve people debate a slide deck for three hours that I'm too impatient to see.
But I don't think so. I think the gap between how most companies operate and how they could operate is massive. And it's getting wider every day as the tools get better and the people willing to use them decisively pull further ahead.
I'm not trying to be cynical about this. I'm frustrated because I can see a better way. And that frustration is a big part of why I started BCK Systems. I love solving business problems with technology. That's it. That's the whole thing. I don't want to sit in meetings about meetings. I want to roll my sleeves up, understand the problem, and build something that actually fixes it — faster and more efficiently than the committee ever could.
One person, clear thinking, the right tools, the willingness to commit to a direction and adjust if it's wrong. That's not some revolutionary management philosophy. It's common sense. But in corporate America, common sense might be the most uncommon thing there is.