Committee - a group of people who keep minutes and waste hours. — Milton Berle

Committee - a group of people who keep minutes and waste hours.

Author: Milton Berle

Insight: We've all felt that sinking feeling when an email lands announcing yet another meeting. The committee—that word alone can drain energy from a room before anyone even shows up. Berle's joke works because it captures something real: meetings often feel like time disappearing into a void, where decisions get made and then unmade, where the same three people talk while everyone else checks their phone. But here's the twist—committees aren't inherently broken. The real problem is that most of us treat meetings like mandatory theater rather than actual work. We show up without a clear agenda, let the chattiest person dominate, and then wonder why nothing changed. The "minutes" get recorded faithfully, but nobody reads them. It's the difference between gathering people to solve something versus gathering people because that's what organizations do. The uncomfortable part? Many of us contribute to this waste. We've all sat in a meeting thinking "this could have been an email," but we rarely push back or suggest ending early. The best committees—the rare ones that actually move things forward—usually have someone willing to say "do we need to be here?" That's the person nobody loves in the moment, but everyone respects afterward.