The Monday meeting exists, at most companies, because nobody knows what happened last week.

The Monday meeting exists, at most companies, because nobody knows what happened last week. It gets presented as alignment. In practice, a large part of it is reconstruction: the manager asks, the rep recalls from memory, and the team spends forty minutes assembling the official version of events that already happened. Only after that does the decision conversation start, if there is time left. **What is management by anecdote?** It is when the information behind a company's decisions arrives through the mouth of whoever did the work, instead of through a record of the work. Sounds like a detail. It is not. Anecdote has three properties that make it dangerous as a basis for management: 1. It is selective. People tell you what they remember, and they remember what went well. 2. It is optimistic by incentive. Nobody opens the week saying their book of business is worse than it looks. 3. It is late. By the time the story is told, the week is gone. Nothing discovered there can still be corrected. The classic symptom is a gap everyone has accepted as normal: the pipeline in the presentation never matches the pipeline in the system. And instead of treating that as a serious instrumentation problem, the company develops a curious habit, which is deciding on the presented number and holding people accountable to the system number. There is another cost almost nobody counts. The Monday meeting pulls the team out of the market during exactly the window when buyers are most available. Multiply the duration by the number of people in the room and you get, every month, several full days of selling capacity spent describing the past. The alternative is not a shorter meeting or a prettier report. It is changing where the information comes from. When data is born at the moment of execution, the Monday conversation stops being "what happened" and becomes "what we do about what happened," which is the only part that requires people in a room. Try an uncomfortable exercise at the next one: before anyone speaks, open the system and put it on the screen. Compare what is in there with what gets said over the following twenty minutes. The distance between the two is, to a good approximation, the size of your operational blind spot. And an operational blind spot never shows up as a loss in the books. It shows up as decisions made late, every time. When we come into an operation, this is one of the first questions we ask: what was the last significant commercial decision you made based on data rather than a conversation? The answer usually takes a while. At your company, how much of the Monday meeting is discovering what already happened, and how much is deciding what happens next?