The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer Rebecca Hinds on Overcoming a "Weapon of Mass Dysfunction": Meetings
It doesn’t matter where you work—bad meetings are a universal pain point. But they don’t have to be.
Rebecca Hinds is an organizational researcher who has spent the past 15 years helping teams fix their broken meetings—and broken collaboration in general. Hinds has applied her Stanford PhD to the future of work, founding think tanks at two technology companies, and is now the author of the forthcoming book, Your Best Meeting Ever: Seven Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done, out February 2026.
Hinds joins organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss how bad meetings can degrade your company’s culture, the purpose meetings should actually serve, and how to start treating meetings as your most valuable product—and not an inevitable headache.
Learn more about The Culture Kit and find the full transcript: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/
*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
3 main takeaways from Jenny & Sameer’s interview with Rebecca Hinds:
- Hold a “meeting doomsday” once a year—ancel every recurring meeting from employees’ calendars for 48 hours and then add meetings in a way that is effective and essential for the current state of business.
- Get your communication system in order—Get everyone on the same page about where official communication takes place and what information they can rely on. This will help people evaluate when and whether a meeting should be called.
- Use AI–When it comes to diagnosing dysfunction in meetings and creating equilibrium in contributions, AI can be your best friend.
Show Links:
- Rebecca Hinds’ website: https://www.rebeccahinds.com/
- Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings that Get Things Done: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Your-Best-Meeting-Ever/Rebecca-Hinds/9781668067482 (launching February 3, 2025)
- The Simple Sabotage Field Manual: https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf
- Meeting Doomsday / Meeting Overload is a Fixable Problem (Harvard Business Review): https://hbr.org/2022/10/meeting-overload-is-a-fixable-problem
- The Collaboration Cleanse / Are Collaboration Tools Overwhelming Your Team (Harvard Business Review): https://hbr.org/2023/08/are-collaboration-tools-overwhelming-your-team
- The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers (Harvard Business Review): https://hbr.org/2025/02/the-hidden-toll-of-meeting-hangovers
Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.
*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
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