UpTrajectory Review

The Economist's Andrew Palmer mounts a defense of something nearly every small-business operator loathes: the bad meeting. Not the productive kind with clear agendas and decisive outcomes, but the tedious, meandering, genuinely unpleasant gatherings that drain calendars and patience alike. Palmer's argument, stripped to its frame, is that these sessions serve functions we systematically undervalue—social cohesion, information diffusion, subtle negotiation, and the tacit signaling of organizational hierarchy. For operators who have spent the pandemic years slashing meeting loads and celebrating asynchronous work, this is a direct challenge to a cherished efficiency narrative. The piece arrives as remote-work advocates and return-to-office commanders remain deadlocked, with meetings caught in the crossfire as both symbol and substance of what work should look like.

For the small-business operator, this matters concretely because meeting culture is not a luxury problem—it is a scaling problem. A five-person shop can coordinate in Slack threads and hallway conversations. At fifteen people, informal channels fracture. At thirty, someone stops knowing what someone else does. Palmer's case, read generously, suggests that the meeting you hated last Tuesday may have transmitted context to a new hire, surfaced a conflict before it hardened, or signaled to a junior employee that their project has executive visibility. These are not outcomes you can spreadsheet. The operator's temptation is to optimize meetings into oblivion, then wonder why the team feels disconnected or decisions stall for lack of shared understanding. The counter-temptation is to let meetings metastasize until they consume the work they are meant to support.

What is genuinely contested here is whether Palmer is describing necessary friction or institutional failure dressed in pragmatic clothing. The piece's headline promises a case for enduring bad meetings, but the text available suggests a more qualified position: that gatherings have utility even when they feel useless. We are skeptical of the framing. There is a difference between meetings that are unpleasant because they are difficult—tense budget reviews, hard personnel conversations—and meetings that are unpleasant because they are poorly designed, dominated by the wrong voices, or held from habit rather than purpose. Palmer's argument risks being appropriated by managers who will use it to justify calendar bloat. The genuinely new observation, if the full piece develops it, may be that the discomfort itself is data: a meeting that feels pointless to participants may indicate a mismatch between formal structure and actual workflow that the organization needs to address, not suppress.

The downstream effects split unevenly. Large corporations can absorb meeting inefficiency as overhead; small businesses cannot. An operator with twelve employees and thin margins faces a different calculus than a Fortune 500 manager. For the small business, a weekly two-hour meeting that 'builds cohesion' represents five percent of total labor capacity—an enormous tax. Remote and hybrid arrangements compound this: the bad Zoom meeting lacks even the ambient benefits of shared physical space, while the good asynchronous update preserves time without sacrificing clarity. Yet Palmer's argument, if correct, implies that something is lost when small teams over-index on efficiency: the serendipitous collision, the gradual acculturation of new members, the demonstration that a founder will sit through tedium alongside staff. These are real but difficult to measure, which makes them easy to dismiss and expensive to rediscover.

What to watch: whether the return-to-office movement uses arguments like Palmer's to mandate presence for presence's sake, and whether small businesses get swept into patterns designed for larger organizations with different pathologies. What to do: audit your recurring meetings not for efficiency alone but for whether they are accomplishing the unstated work Palmer identifies. If a meeting builds cohesion, that should be explicit in its design, not a post-hoc rationalization. If it transmits information, ask whether a document could do so faster. If it cannot pass either test, kill it. The operator's advantage is agility—use it to experiment with meeting load and measure what breaks, rather than accepting either the efficiency maximalists' purism or the traditionalists' complacency. The bad meeting you endure should be one you have chosen to endure for a reason you can articulate, not one you suffer because someone once decided it was useful.

Takeaway: Audit each recurring meeting for unstated social function; if you cannot name it explicitly, redesign or eliminate it.