Something I heard that stuck with me was that, for important business decisions, the "meeting" is almost ceremonial-only: to make the decision offical. Such meetings should essentially be fast, no digressions, just 'the biz'.

All the work to actually reach requisite agreement for the decision is done in the days / weeks leading up to the meeting via ad-hoc-ish one-on-one or one-on-very-few meetings (possibly including graft and corruption).

The "decision" meeting isn't organised until the result is known and guaranteed.

This maybe doesn't apply to Agile / Development-related meetings, but I'll keep trying to determine how to make it apply, such is my disdain for this (seemingly) waste of the team's time (he said, whilst posting on HN).