"Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything"
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Galbraith skewers the modern bureaucracy with the calm precision of someone who’s watched “process” eat every real decision in the room. The first line lands like friendly office advice, then tightens into an accusation: meetings aren’t neutral containers for collaboration, they’re machinery that turns action into negotiation theater. Calling them a “trap” reframes what most workplaces treat as virtuous - alignment, buy-in, consensus - as a kind of institutional quicksand.
The key barb is the pivot from agreement to entitlement. Once you convene people to “get agreement,” dissent stops being information and becomes a claim: the dissenter now “has a right to be persuaded.” Galbraith’s subtext is that meeting culture quietly shifts the burden of proof from reality to rhetoric. Instead of asking, “What’s true? What works?” the group asks, “Can we sell this to everyone here?” It’s democracy as performance, not governance as responsibility.
The closer is vintage Galbraith: dry, lethal, and perfectly timed. Meetings become “indispensable” precisely when you want the appearance of movement without the risks of choosing. In the mid-20th-century world Galbraith inhabited - big government, big corporations, committees as default - that’s not just a joke; it’s a warning about how institutions protect themselves. When decisions are costly, meetings offer a cheaper substitute: shared accountability, diluted agency, and a paper trail that proves everyone participated in doing nothing.
The key barb is the pivot from agreement to entitlement. Once you convene people to “get agreement,” dissent stops being information and becomes a claim: the dissenter now “has a right to be persuaded.” Galbraith’s subtext is that meeting culture quietly shifts the burden of proof from reality to rhetoric. Instead of asking, “What’s true? What works?” the group asks, “Can we sell this to everyone here?” It’s democracy as performance, not governance as responsibility.
The closer is vintage Galbraith: dry, lethal, and perfectly timed. Meetings become “indispensable” precisely when you want the appearance of movement without the risks of choosing. In the mid-20th-century world Galbraith inhabited - big government, big corporations, committees as default - that’s not just a joke; it’s a warning about how institutions protect themselves. When decisions are costly, meetings offer a cheaper substitute: shared accountability, diluted agency, and a paper trail that proves everyone participated in doing nothing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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