This is a much more difficult problem at large companies where meeting rooms can be a scarce resource, and other meetings that run long can negatively impact yours.

Having a plan for the meeting and having everybody trying to keep the meeting short helps a lot. I think if you're in a place where you need to write ground rules for meeting there's a larger cultural problem that needs to be addressed.

I couldn't agree more. At my company, we have a few thousand employees spread across 2 main locations in the same city and 25 smaller offices. BUT we only have 12 full sized conference rooms and 4 that only seat 5. So we end up scheduling meetings more around conference room availability than person availability, and then we have people having to walk/bike/cab/uber a mile (or more) from another location to get to this meeting on time.

Scheduling meetings around employees (especially management), vendors and conference rooms is one of the biggest challenges we face for meeting times.

Try Sococo - virtual conference rooms. I swear, its better than everybody sitting in a physical room. You can see, hear, share docs, chat, form subgroups and regroup fluidly.

Caveat: I own stock (used to work there)

We have this through various other tools, but it will never kill off the need for face to face communications. Drawing on the white board, throwing markers at each other, two people presenting ideas at the same time.

This is especially difficult during technical integration meetings, where you are tossing around ideas left and right.

Sococo does all but the 'throwing markers' part.

Our meetings always start late but always end right on time. Either somebody rambles for half an hour to fill the time or the meeting closes in the middle of finding a solution.