Tausi Insider

Meetings are valuable for most organizations, most of the time. Meetings build the cohesion that makes teams what they are. monkeybusinessimages/iStockPhoto / Getty Images Karl Oczkowski is the senior director of corporate communications and public relations at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. As business leaders rush to applaud Shopify’s announcement that it will drastically limit meetings across the company, we would be wise to remember that novel solutions apply only under novel circumstances – and few organizations are as novel as Shopify. Meetings, when done right, are not the enemy of productivity but a part of it. Surely we’ve all spent a day tied up in a fruitless e-mail exchange over a complicated issue, only to later wonder how much more quickly a solution would have surfaced had everyone simply been together – in a quick meeting. The appeal of Shopify’s decision, which emphasizes execution over discussion for its entirely remote work force, is easy to understand, and the ...