Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on why your company has too many meetings (and it's not what you think) Most companies blame meeting overload on bad habits, weak managers, or poor scheduling. @bchesky thinks they're looking in the wrong place entirely. The real culprit is simpler and harder to fix than any of those things. You just have too many people. "The reason there's too many meetings in a company isn't because they don't have meeting-no-meeting Wednesdays. It's because they have too many people. People create meetings. And the best way to get rid of meetings is to not have so many people." His argument runs deeper than headcount management. It's about what happens when you hire people who aren't truly excellent and what those people inevitably do next. You've probably heard the classic line: A-players hire A-players, B-players hire C-players. Chesky amends it: "B players hire lots of C players — not just a few, but a lot. Because those are the kind of people that like building empires." The reason is structural, not personal. A person who can't do the job can't hire someone better than themselves, so they hire down. Then they need two or three of those people just to cover the gap. Those people scatter, pulling in different directions, and suddenly you have more meetings, more overhead, and less output. Chesky's response at Airbnb was surgical. He removed layers of management and returned to a functional structure with one strict rule: You can only manage a function if you're actually an expert in it. "The head of design has to actually manage the work first. You don't manage people. You manage people through the work." He credits this thinking to Jony Ive. At most tech companies, heads of design manage the people rather than the design itself, a separation Chesky found completely incoherent. "How can you manage the people separate from the design? Jony Ive would say, 'No, my main job is to manage the work. I build a team and we design together, but I'm mostly looking at the work. I'm not having career conversations all day long. That's crazy.'" Lean means every person is genuinely excellent and led by someone embedded deeply enough in the craft to judge their output. When that's true, decisions move faster and work gets evaluated on its merits. Most companies treat meeting overload as a scheduling problem. Chesky thinks that's the wrong diagnosis entirely, and until you address the root cause, no policy is going to fix it.