> Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not (or will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format, in an organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting starts, by having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's obligation to spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move those people out the "Next!" door?

Up to you.

If you are running the company, you can set the expectation and punishment.

However, if I have read all the relevant material, what was the point of the meeting?

The problem is that meetings wind up serving multiple purposes, and you don't always know which one you are in before the meeting starts. There are meetings to hash out a difficult problem (rare, but very important). There are meetings to disseminate information and vision (common, and useless to a lot of people but required because you never know when you are the person who missed the relevant info). There are meetings to CYA (too common). There are meetings to solve things which cross management boundaries or allocate resources (somewhat less common, but important). Then there are simply political or show meetings by useless people (sadly too common).

In reality, the really big problem is that people don't feel able to slag a meeting because it looks like you are slagging the person in charge of the meeting. I can send back "Will Not Attend" to meeting requests and will get indignant responses of:

"What the hell do you mean you won't attend?"

"Fine, tell me what input from me that you are going to need."

"Ummmmmmmmmm."

"Exactly. When you can tell me what input I'm supposed to give other than consumption of oxygen, I'll attend."