However short and focused they are, my definition of a meeting is a schedule block of (any size of) time where a number of people are expected to party on something and decide on some action.
To extend Zach's metaphor, meetings are a communication mutex. They force a topic to be wrestled by a group of people at the lowest-common-denominator of pace. I think they're rarely the best or most efficient way to collaborate.
The goal isn't to decide on anything, just to let everyone know where you're at.
"""You don’t have this problem with chat transcripts. Forcing people to reduce their otherwise rambling thoughts into concrete sentences helps focus discussion, too.
We’ll have meetings at GitHub, but I can count the number of full “meetings” we’ve had in the last year and a half on one hand."""
The former bit implying that the focus of sentences helps, the latter bit implying to keep the membership of the meeting to only those required.
Again: siloing is far more toxic than meetings in my experience. It's far too easy for a dev to wander down a path that has no value when operating in a silo. Agile tells us that we need to exist in a state of constant communication and feedback. This necessitates meeting with people in some fashion.
Anyways. Maybe semantics.. My points were just that meetings are basically awful, and that there's a distinction between communication and meetings... Meetings aren't the only form of communication.
I have worked under a similar model for almost a decade now. It comes with so many benefits over a traditional meeting that I am uncertain why any software development company would do it any other way.
I echoed his sentiments in a post I wrote about working remotely - http://arandomurl.com/2011/09/03/working-remotely.html
That is nowhere in sight in the post. In fact, the content of the section is even more damning than the title:
> I tend to loathe meetings even more than 37signals. I despise them.
> meetings pull you from doing actual work in order to talk about doing work.
> meetings are utterly forgettable. Even if you take meeting notes, you can’t capture them all.
Zach does not say he likes "short, focused and tiny meetings", Zach says he hates meetings as much as a human being can hate a concept.
That said, too many meetings are intensely toxic for any company, and nothing is worse than working at a company that thinks meetings are "getting things done".