Corporate America is drowning in meetings. To make one thing

Host: The morning light spilled through the blinds of a corporate office, striping the conference table in pale gold and gray. The clock on the wall ticked with bureaucratic precision, though no one in the room seemed to notice. The air hummed faintly with the sound of the HVAC and the buzz of screensavers.

At one end of the room, a slide deck flickered on a large screen: bullet points, buzzwords, and a title that read “Quarterly Alignment Sync.”

Jack sat slouched, tie loosened, jaw clenched, staring at the cursor blinking on his laptop like it was mocking him. Across the table, Jeeny typed notes with quiet, almost meditative rhythm, her face calm, her focus unbreakable.

Between them, printed on a coffee-stained memo, lay the quote:
“Corporate America is drowning in meetings. To make one thing clear, I am not against communication. Quick one-on-ones can be extremely effective. I am talking about those hour-long recurring meetings, devoid of a clear agenda, and attended by many. I dread them.” — Sebastian Thrun.

Jeeny: (without looking up) “You’ve been staring at that screen for twenty minutes. What are you thinking?”

Jack: (flatly) “I’m thinking I’ve lost three hours of my life to a meeting about time efficiency.”

Host: The room was a perfect metaphor for his sentence—a sterile, windowless monotony, brightly lit, but entirely soulless. Outside, the city moved, but inside, time seemed to hold its breath.

Jeeny: “You’re not wrong. But that’s what happens when communication becomes performance instead of purpose.”

Jack: “Performance is right. Half the people in that room were talking just to exist. And the other half were nodding to stay employed.”

Jeeny: (smiling faintly) “Meetings are modern rituals, Jack. We don’t pray anymore, we sync.”

Jack: “Yeah. Except at least prayer was supposed to be sacred. These things are just scheduled suffering.”

Host: The overhead lights hummed louder as if they too were exhausted by repetition. The coffee pot on the counter was half empty, its contents burned, bitter, and old—like everything else that had been sitting too long without purpose.

Jeeny: “You ever wonder why we do it? Sit through hour-long monologues, slide after slide of nothing?”

Jack: “Because it gives the illusion of control. Managers think if everyone’s in the same room, they’re on the same page. But no one’s reading.”

Jeeny: “You think it’s about control?”

Jack: “Of course. You can’t measure trust, but you can measure attendance. Meetings are just checkpoints for the insecure.”

Jeeny: (leaning back, thoughtful) “Or maybe they’re just habit. Corporate culture runs on inertia. If we stopped to ask ‘why,’ the whole thing might collapse.”

Jack: “So we just pretend it’s working.”

Jeeny: “Exactly. We replace results with rituals, and clarity with calendars.”

Host: The office outside their glass walls was a maze of desks and faces illuminated by screens. People moved without looking up, typing, scrolling, replying, their lives measured in pings and deadlines.

Jack: “You know what Thrun got right? It’s not communication that’s broken—it’s attention. We’ve diluted it so thin across all this noise that even truth can’t get through.”

Jeeny: “Then maybe the real meeting we need isn’t in a conference room. It’s the one we never have with ourselves.”

Jack: (dryly) “Sounds like another calendar invite waiting to happen.”

Jeeny: “No, Jack. That’s the point—it’s the only one you can’t schedule.”

Host: She stood, walking toward the window, where the sunlight was beginning to angle across the city. Her reflection in the glass looked like a ghost—half in this world, half in thought.

Jeeny: “The worst meetings aren’t the ones that waste your time, Jack. They’re the ones that waste your spirit. The ones where no one is honest, because everyone’s afraid to speak.”

Jack: “So we sit there, agreeing, nodding, pretending it’s progress.”

Jeeny: “And then we wonder why everything feels stuck.”

Host: The clock on the wall ticked again. Jack glanced at it, then at his calendar, which was already filling with new invites—Weekly Review, Strategic Sync, All-Hands Update.

Jack: “You know what’s worse than bad meetings?”

Jeeny: “What?”

Jack: “Good ones. Because they trick you into thinking the system can be fixed.”

Jeeny: “Maybe it can. If we remember what talking was supposed to be for.”

Jack: “Which is?”

Jeeny: “To understand. Not to announce.”

Host: A long silence settled. The buzz of the lights felt louder now, the hum of machinery sounding almost human, like the city itself was sighing.

Jack: “You ever think we built all this just to avoid silence? The meetings, the emails, the endless noise—it’s all to fill the space where honesty should be.”

Jeeny: (softly) “Maybe silence is the only meeting worth having.”

Host: Jack looked at her, and for a long moment, neither spoke. The sound of a notification pinged softly on his laptop, but he didn’t reach for it.

Jack: “You know, I think Thrun was wrong about one thing.”

Jeeny: “What’s that?”

Jack: “He says he dreads those meetings. I think we’ve stopped even dreading them. That’s worse. At least dread means you still feel something.”

Jeeny: “Then maybe today’s the day we start feeling again.”

Host: She closed her laptop, gathered her things, and walked out—no goodbye, no glance back, just a quiet refusal. Jack watched her go, the door clicking softly behind her.

He sat there, the room now empty, the projector still glowing on the wall, the slides changing on autopilot.

He stood, reached over, and turned off the screen.

The silence that followed was startling. Alive. Real.

Host: The camera would have pulled back, past the glass, past the cubicles**, past** the entire building, where a thousand more meetings were still talking themselves into nothing.

Outside, the city pulsed quietly—machines and humans both running their loops, both chasing meaning in the wrong places.

And in that moment, the truth of Thrun’s words hung like a verdict over the skyline—

That communication without clarity isn’t connection,
that talking without truth is just noise,
and that perhaps, in trying so hard to align,
Corporate America had finally misplaced its soul.