11 tricks Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and other famous execs use to run meetings

A third of all meetings in America are unproductive, according to a 2013 study.

Unproductive meetings are usually caused by having too many people in the room, not having an agenda, or simply meeting too often.

Successful executives like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs developed techniques to combat bad meetings — for example, Steve Jobs liked to have meetings with the fewest number of people possible.

Americans sit through some 11 million meetings every day. A third of those meetings are unproductive, costing companies $37 billion a year, according to a 2013 study.

When meetings go horribly wrong, it's usually due to sloppy agendas, un-articulated ground rules, and having too many participants, among other basic structural mistakes.

Some of the most effective executives in history — from GM czar Alfred Sloan to Apple's Steve Jobs to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — have personally run the meetings that invariably filled their calendars.

Here are the tips and tricks they've used to make meetings more productive.