An ineffective meeting can adversely affect morale and degrade trust, the opposite of its intended purpose. Kris Snyder has experienced plenty of stalled meetings where nothing significant is decided, and people aren’t engaged in the discussion.
After years of experience as an entrepreneur, Snyder understands that the true problem of unproductive meetings is the leadership, and he knows exactly where they have gone wrong. His book, Meetings Kinda Suck, part of the EOS Impact Library, gives leadership guidance on how to make their meetings effective.
“It comes from years of sitting in session rooms watching meetings go sideways and then helping teams fix them. The content is tested, honest, and practical, not theoretical,” says Snyder.
Conquering the Doom Loop
Snyder has over 25 years of experience in building, leading, scaling, and selling companies. By learning from early mistakes in his career, Snyder has gathered the expertise that makes him an effective coach to other leaders.
“Early in my career, I lived in what Jim Collins calls the Doom Loop. I would call emergency strategy sessions every time we missed a number, get the team fired up, make new commitments, and then nothing would change. No follow-through. No cadence. I thought I was being responsive. I was feeding chaos,” says Snyder.
Snyder recognized the negative effect his constant direction changes were taking on his team and grasped that every company problem he was dealing with originated with his leadership. Once he identified the problem, he set out to correct it.
Learning about business operating systems (EOS) and committing to “structure, rhythm, and discipline” turned things around for him and his team. Instead of transactional leadership, where he told people what to do, he shifted to coaching leadership, building people up, and transformational leadership, developing other leaders.
Choosing Purpose Over Default
In 2006, Snyder founded Vox Mobile, a company that had over 200 employees and raised over $30 million in growth capital. After successfully exiting the company in 2018, he launched Impact Architects, which advises small- and mid-sized business owners on implementing business operating systems such as the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS).
Currently, Snyder works at Ninety.io, where he helped grow the company’s revenue and has built a partner network of over 2,000 coaches and advisors. Ninety.io is a business operating system software platform that helps leadership teams run their companies effectively.
“Ninety's software supports companies running on EOS and other business operating systems, and my coaching work directly informs the products we build,” Snyder explains.
Snyder coaches EOS meetings several times a week, so he is constantly dealing with real-world company problems, giving him an up-to-date understanding of current issues. This knowledge has informed his latest venture to help other leaders.
Snyder’s book, Meetings Kinda Suck, is the result of his experience with 400+ coaching sessions. The end of each chapter includes a “Meetings Suck Less Realization” that gives readers a lesson they can apply immediately. The book also has a guest chapter on the psychology of meetings by Audra Stanton, M.D., Head of Product at Ninety.io, and a foreword by Kelly Knight, Integrator/President of EOS Worldwide.
“Most meeting advice out there reads like a vitamin. I position everything I do as a painkiller, not a vitamin. Vitamins are nice, and they might help in the long run. Painkillers solve urgent problems now,” says Snyder.
Snyder has turned his experience into a successful coaching career, helping leaders make their meetings with their teams more productive.
Copyright © 2026 California Business Journal. All Rights Reserved.
For California Business Journal Disclaimers, go to /terms-conditions/.
