Meeting Rules That Are Actually Documented (Not Just Attributed to a Famous Name)
Two of the three executives usually credited in this genre of advice have genuinely documented meeting practices on the record. The advice holds up -- some of the specific attributions don't.
The best-sourced practice here is Amazon's, described at length by former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr in Working Backwards: meetings open with 20-30 minutes of silent reading of a structured, narrative memo -- Amazon famously banned PowerPoint for this purpose -- instead of a live presentation, so everyone is actually working from the same information before discussion starts. The related "two-pizza team" rule, keeping a group small enough that two pizzas can feed everyone in it, is one of Amazon's most consistently cited practices for keeping decision-making groups small enough to actually decide something. Elon Musk's contribution is also on the record, not folklore: a widely reported 2018 internal email to Tesla staff instructed employees to leave a meeting or drop off a call the moment it becomes clear they aren't adding value, calling it "not rude" to do so, alongside guidance to avoid large, frequent meetings.
Both practices point at the same underlying principle: a meeting should exist because a decision needs multiple people in the room, not by default. Amazon's approach enforces that with prepared, silent-read material so the meeting itself is spent deciding, not presenting; Musk's approach enforces it more bluntly, by making it normal to leave the moment your presence stops adding anything. A useful synthesis, regardless of attribution: state the one decision a meeting needs to make before you schedule it, and if you can't, that's a sign it should be a memo, a message, or nothing at all.
Worth being clear-eyed about: several other specifics that circulate in this genre, including exact framing commonly attributed directly to Warren Buffett, aren't as well documented as the Amazon and Tesla examples above -- treat those as generally sound meeting hygiene rather than verified quotes from a specific person. The parts that are well-sourced are enough on their own: come with a stated purpose, keep the group small, prepare material in advance instead of presenting live, and give every decision exactly one owner and one deadline before the meeting ends.
Based on Colin Bryar and Bill Carr's Working Backwards (Amazon's meeting and memo culture) and Elon Musk's widely reported 2018 internal email to Tesla staff on meeting efficiency.
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