No one knows who held the first one. Every office assumes it has always existed.
The Monday morning meeting has no documented inventor, no founding patent, and no legislative origin. It emerged alongside the standardization of the nine-to-five workday and the Monday-to-Friday work week during the first half of the twentieth century, when corporate hierarchies required regular mechanisms for synchronization.1
As organizations grew from small workshops into multi-departmental corporations, managers needed a recurring moment to align priorities across divisions. The weekly meeting, placed at the start of the work week, became that moment.
Management theorist Peter Drucker, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, observed that most meetings consumed enormous amounts of executive time with little to show for it. In The Effective Executive (1967), he argued that any organization that demands more than a quarter of its members' time for meetings is malfunctioning.2
A 2022 survey by Microsoft found that the number of weekly meetings had more than tripled since February 2020, with the average worker spending 7.5 hours per week in meetings.3
The practice persists not because research supports it but because it is embedded in the rhythm of organizational life. A 2017 Harvard Business Review article reported that 71 percent of senior managers surveyed described meetings as unproductive and inefficient.4
The Monday morning meeting belongs to a category of workplace practices that were never formally designed, tested, or evaluated before becoming universal. It is a convention, not an invention, inherited through imitation rather than evidence.5