105 Inspiring Quotes on Teams and Meetings

The work of managers requires them to be in meetings with workers and clients. Many well-known personalities have given their opinions about meetings. Here are their quotes. As a manager, you may identify with some of them.

Here are some interesting quotes about meetings to think about:

1. “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” ~Bill Nye

2. “Meetings at work present great opportunities to showcase your talent. Do not let them go to waste.” ~Abhishek Ratna

3. “Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.” ~Elizabeth Bowen

4. “You have a meeting to make a decision, not to decide on the question.” ~Bill Gates

5. “Meeting specifications is not enough.” ~W. Edwards Deming

6. “The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.” ~Tim Cook

7. “Be genuinely interested in everyone you meet, and everyone you meet will be genuinely interested in you.” ~Rasheed Ogunlaru

8. “90% of strategy is execution. 90% of execution is people.” ~Thibaut

9. “Leaders who sit in meetings all the time will never have enough time to implement their plans.” ~Gift Gugu Mona

10. “You need long meetings only when you don’t trust your team, or are less experienced than your players and want to learn from them.” ~Vineet Raj Kapoor

11. “Because meetings involve people, things can and will go wrong. Provide first aid when necessary.” ~Emily M. Axelrod

12. “Actions speak louder than meetings.” ~Lee Clow

13. “I don’t put my ideas in a meeting for acceptance or rejection, I put them in the market for success or failure.” ~Amit Kalantri

14. “Meetings are at the heart of an effective organization, and each meeting is an opportunity to clarify issues, set new directions, sharpen focus, create alignment, and move objectives forward.” ~Paul Axtell

15. “The person in the meeting that challenges the status quo is often the most valuable person in the room.” ~Shane Parrish

16. “The world is run by those willing to sit until the end of meetings.” ~Hugh Park

17. “Meetings move at the speed of the slowest mind in the room.” ~Dale Dauten

18. “The magic to a great meeting is all of the work that’s done beforehand.” ~Bill Russell

19. “People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” ~Thomas Sowell

20. “Being on a board is not just about showing up for the meetings. A board member needs to materially contribute to the success of the business.” ~Scott Weiss

21. “I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity.” ~Oprah Winfrey

22. “The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.” ~Thomas Sowell

23. “If we have a clear agenda in advance, and we are fully present and fully contributing, the meetings do go much faster.” ~Unknown

24. “Meetings without an agenda are like a restaurant without a menu.” ~Susan B. Wilson

25. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~Margaret Mead

26. “Designing a meeting is like designing a relationship.” ~John Nawn

27. “You can’t forget that organizational success flows from the hearts and minds of the men and women you lead. Rather than treating your people as you’d like to be treated, treat them as they would like to be treated. Small gestures like opting for face-to-face meetings or sending personal notes can have an enormous impact on teams and their morale.” ~Marillyn Hewson

28. “No matter what role you play in a meeting, how you show up in that role is critical to the meeting’s success. ~Emily M. Axelrod

29. “The future depends on what you do today.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

30. “None of us is as smart as all of us.” ~Ken Blanchard

31. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” ~Albert Schweitzer

32. “Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.” ~Theodore Roosevelt

33. “The great victory, which appears so simple today, was the result of a series of small victories that went unnoticed.” ~Paulo Coelho

34. “Meetings should be like salt — a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.” ~Jason Fried

35. “There is no way to justify a long meeting, more than 15 to 30 minutes, where no decisions are made. This kind of meeting should never happen; it is unnecessary.” ~Carlos Marui

36. “all the work’s done low on the food chain. Everyone else just has meetings.” ~Mick Herron

37. “The meetings and marches and vigils are cool, but if the enemy isn’t present, you’re just talking slick to a can of oil.” ~Darnell Lamont Walker

38. “Don’t do for a group what a group can do for itself.” ~Emily M. Axelrod

39. “If managers suddenly realize that they’re spending less time sitting through meetings wondering why they are there, that’s an early signal that companies have become better at making decisions. When meetings start with a common understanding about who is responsible for providing valuable input and who has the D, an organization’s decision-making metabolism will get a boost.” ~Marcia W. Blenko

40. “A meeting is a collective tacit confession of participants’ unwillingness to work.” ~Pawan Mishra

41. “Be a pro at what you do. No one shows up to meetings of the Unsuccessful Skydivers Club.” ~Ryan Lilly

42. “A great strategy meeting is a meeting of minds.” ~Max McKeown

43. “Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: ‘just give us the money.” ~Alain de Botton

44. “If you arrive for a meeting with a man, you do not trust, and the man you do not trust does not arrive, do not trust the man who first arrives at the meeting.” ~Andrew Levkoff

45. “Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.” ~John F Kennedy

46. Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it.” ~Chinese proverb

47. “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” ~Mark Twain

48. “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.” ~Jimmy Johnson

49. “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” ~Dalai Lama

50. “Hard work spotlights the character of people. Some turn up their sleeves. Some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.” ~Sam Ewing

51. “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” ~Socrates

52. “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” ~Tim Notke

53. “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” ~Steve Jobs

54. “Always go into meetings or negotiations with a positive attitude. Tell yourself you’re going to make this the best deal for all parties.” ~Natalie Massenet

55. “The majority of meetings should be discussions that lead to decisions.” ~Patrick Lencioni

56. “Meeting expectations is good. Exceeding expectations is better.” ~Ron Kaufman

57. “To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three people, two of whom are absent.” ~Robert Copeland

58. “It is important to have face-to-face meetings, so when the players have things on their mind, we talk. It is important to have a good relationship with your players. If they like you and love you — and the other way around — you will be successful.” ~Julian Nagelsmann

59. “We all have original ideas. Even if we don’t see ourselves as super creative or as wild nonconformists, we have insights every day about how the world around us could be better. It might be a better way of running meetings in your office that would be less mind-numbing. It might be a little twist on a product or a service.” ~Adam Grant

60. “Over the years, I paid careful attention in client meetings and jotted down things that quite didn’t make sense. And I had the courage to raise questions and to be skeptical when something didn’t add up.” ~Cathy Engelbert

61. “Deep learning is a very capital-intensive area, and it’s rare to find a company with both the necessary resources and a company structure where things can get done without having to pass through too many channels and committee meetings.” ~Andrew Ng

62. “You never know who’s going to become your friend. Friends are always chance meetings. ~Steve Guttenberg

63. “If you’re trying to stay productive, stop and think, ‘Are my meetings actually productive, or are we merely having meetings for meetings’ sake?’ ~Chris Fussell

64. “The travel, the amazing work I have had the chance to do, the meetings with different people are all very inspiring and give me lots of positive energy.” ~Saskia de Brauw

65. “A typical day for me involves a lot of meetings.” ~Sophia Amoruso

66. “Meetings don’t have to be endless to be eternal.” ~James E. Faust

67. “My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them, and implemented the fifteen that worked.” ~Steven Gary Blank

68. “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” ~John Quincy Adams

69. “What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.” ~Dave Thomas, Founder of Wendy’s

70. “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” ~Thomas Edison

71. “There’s nothing wrong with staying small. You can do big things with a small team.” ~Jason Fried

72. “Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.” ~Guy Kawasaki

73. “It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.” ~Scott Belsky

74. “Chase the vision, not the money, the money will end up following you.” ~Tony Hsieh

75. “See things in the present, even if they are in the future.” ~Larry Ellison

76. “Whether you think you can or think you can’t — you’re right.” ~Henry Ford

77. “If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.” ~Steve Jobs

78. “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” ~Henry Ford

79. “Action without vision is only passing time, vision without action is merely day dreaming, but vision with action can change the world.” ~Nelson Mandela

80. “The amount of meetings I’ve been in — people would be shocked. But that’s how you gain experience, how you can gain knowledge, being in meetings and participating. You learn and grow.” ~Tiger Woods

81. “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” ~Socrates

82. “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” ~Nelson Mandela

83. “When you focus on problems, you’ll have more problems. When you focus on possibilities, you’ll have more opportunities.” ~Zig Ziglar

84. “How you enter a space and how you leave a space is as important as what happens in the space.” ~Emily M. Axelrod

85. “Great ideas doesn’t need approvals, they need application.” ~Amit Kalantri

86. “My ideas will not be discussed; they will be executed.” ~Amit Kalantri

87. “A meeting consists of a group of people who have little to say — until after the meeting.” ~P.K. Shaw

88. “Individual commitment to a group effort–that is what makes a teamwork, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” ~Vince Lombardi

89. “A meeting moves at the speed of the slowest mind in the room. In other words, all but one participant will be bored, all one mind but underused.” ~Dale Dauten

90. “I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.” ~Elon Musk

91. “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.” ~Eric Ries

92. “The more honest and unique a person is, the more that person attracts people. It’s the same for businesses.” ~Maxime Lagacé

93. “When you work on something, if you fall in love with it, that’s a good sign. If you do, others will.” ~Elon Musk

94. “Think big. Start small.” ~Seth Godin

95. “Whatever you’re thinking, think bigger.” ~Tony Hsieh

96. “Prioritizing is the most important thing in business.” ~ Noah Kagan

97. “The best way to get the attention and respect of exceptional people is to do exceptional work.” ~James Clear

98. “Everyone knows that you need a great team, great execution, and a great idea. Less obvious is that you have to have great endurance.” ~Sam Altman

99. “The fastest way to become exceptional is to work with exceptional people. If you want to be a great engineer, work at a company with great engineers. Want to start a company? Work for an early-stage startup with extraordinary founders. Watch them work, and learn by osmosis.” ~Sahil Lavingia

100. “The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.” ~Vince Lombardi

101. “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” ~Theodore Roosevelt

102. “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” ~Henry Ford

103. “Individual honors come with team success.” ~Gilbert Arenas

104. “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” ~Elon Musk

105. “Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” ~Ryunosuke Satoro