Where did you pick up the fact that his actual point was to hold tiny focused meetings? Working asynchronously is pretty anti-meeting, and frankly it's totally independent of a culture that supports silos. I work in a very asynchronous culture right now. Very few meetings.. but that's not to say we don't communicate. We communicate very thoroughly.

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.