The 300,000-hour meeting is on your calendar too

Yes, and you are almost certainly paying for several. Bain documented one company whose weekly executive committee meeting consumed roughly 300,000 hours a year once you counted every meeting held to feed it — about 150 full-time people servicing a single recurring slot. The number is not exotic. Your steering committee, change advisory board, vendor syncs and release board run the same cascade. The feature did not take six months to build. It took six months to discuss.

What did Bain actually count?

The arresting part is not the total; it is how a single recurring meeting manufactures one. By Bain's account, the eleven-member executive committee spent 7,000 hours a year in the meeting itself — unremarkable arithmetic for a weekly leadership session. To walk in prepared, each of the eleven first met with their unit heads, and those pre-briefs added another 20,000 hours. The unit heads' staff then prepared them, and their staff prepared that, until the prep-for-the-prep had cascaded through every layer of the company. Sum the layers and you reach 300,000 hours — and, the authors note, that number still excludes the desk time spent building the slides.

Why does one meeting turn into 150 people?

Divide 300,000 hours by a roughly 2,000-hour working year and you get about 150 full-time people whose entire job, in effect, is that one slot. The cost lives nowhere near the room. It lives in the gravitational pull the room exerts on everyone obliged to feed it. Each attendee owes the meeting a defensible position, and forming one means holding a meeting of your own first — which obliges your reports to hold theirs. A standing meeting is not an event on a calendar; it is a recurring demand for readiness that propagates downward one layer at a time, every week. The eleven calendars you can see are a rounding error against the cascade you cannot.

Most of those hours decide nothing. They are spent getting ready to be asked — rehearsing answers, reconciling figures, and above all producing the pack: the thick alignment deck assembled so that no question lands unanswered. It is a great deal of skilled effort poured into an artifact that is read once and discarded, the deck where context quietly goes to die.

Where is the same cascade hiding in your platform org?

Bain's example is a general-management committee, but nothing about the mechanism is specific to the C-suite. Count the standing governance bodies wrapped around a route-to-market platform: the monthly steering committee, the architecture review board, the change advisory board, the release go/no-go, and one recurring sync per vendor boundary. Each is an executive committee in miniature, and each drags its own prep cascade behind it. A feature waiting for the next steering slot is not being built; it is queued — which is where most of its calendar life is already spent.

Then multiply. Run that governance stack across several operating companies and you have not one 300,000-hour meeting but a portfolio of them, stacked on each other: a release board deciding when you may ship, sitting above a freeze window deciding when you may not. None of it lands on a budget line marked coordination, which is precisely why it never gets cut. The feature did not take six months to build. It took six months to clear the meetings that had to approve it, align on it, and be briefed about it.

What is all that coordination actually buying?

Some of it is load-bearing. A genuine dependency gets resolved, a real risk gets caught, a decision that needed three owners in one room finally gets made. The trouble is that the cascade cannot tell a load-bearing meeting from a ceremonial one, and it charges the full downstream cost for both. Every governance body exists to make one group's work legible to another — to let finance see delivery, or one vendor see the next — so the coordination bill scales with the number of boundaries you have drawn, not with how much real deciding happens across them. A board that rubber-stamps almost everything it sees is not a filter; it is a queue with an agenda, and it still triggers the full weight of preparation upstream of itself.

The way out is not shorter meetings or tighter facilitation; it is fewer boundaries to coordinate across. Every governance body you can retire — by putting order capture, stock, delivery and returnables on one team and one event bus rather than six vendors and a steering committee — deletes a cascade, not merely a calendar entry. That is a structural change with its own long argument; here it is enough to see how much of your delivery cost is the cascade rather than the code.

The build cost of a feature keeps falling; the coordination cost of the organisation around it does not, because it is set by how many bodies must align before anyone may act. Left unexamined, every reorganisation adds a board and every new vendor adds a sync, and the cascade widens a layer at a time. The teams that pull ahead over the next few years will not be the ones running tighter steering calls. They will be the ones who counted their own 300,000-hour meetings — and started cancelling them.