The principle of keeping meetings to small numbers of smart people is a key tenet at Apple and essential to any company that wants to be able to nurture quality thinking. It is a very basic premise – that everybody in the meeting should have a good reason to be there. You’re either vital to the success of the meeting or you should be somewhere else. Spectators should not be invited.
The idea that a smaller group will be more motivated and more focused than a larger one is a pretty simple idea, as is the notion that smart people will do good-quality work. However, this principle that seems to be obvious common sense is one that a surprising number of organizations ignore. How many meetings have you sat through in the past years that were massively overpopulated? How often has such a meeting gone way off track? The small meeting rule needs to be enforced, for it is a rule worth enforcing.