In my department, we used to have a quarter status update hosted by the VP. We found that session is very useful, keep us posted with the lastest project related news in department. When the VP was transfered to another department, the acting VP stopped the quaterly meeting. We kinda miss it. Now, we just have a new VP for the department. Instead of quaterly meeting, he hosts monthly meeting, and this month I just had one. Sometimes it is not always more the better. This materials in this meeting is 80% recycled from last month, there is not enough new stuff to keep us interested. In another word, our time is basically wasted for the meeting. My colleague in the next cube calculated how much this meeting has cost the company. There is over 100 engineers idling in the meeting for an hour, the is more than 100 man-hours lost in productivity. Take the man-hours times our averaged hourly wage, the company lost tens of thousands over this meeting. The cost saved by having a quaterly meeting instead of monthly culmulated over a year could buy every engineer a second LCD monitor.