“Sometimes, when I sit in meetings, especially ones in which people don’t seem engaged, I calculate the cost in staff time. I’ve estimated that one standard weekly meeting in my bureau — 50 people sitting in a cookie-cutter conference room, looking both bored and anxious — costs around $177,000 annually, and surely this scenario occurs throughout the [organization] hundreds of times a day. It drains us, and it breeds cynicism. So many meetings are lost opportunities.”