Barack Obama described how he ran meetings as president. “I’d call on folks in the back row, including the most junior staffer,” he wrote in an essay published on December 9, 2020.
In 2018 he told a conference audience in Las Vegas about meetings in the Situation Room. In the outer ring of the room sat “a whole bunch of people, often younger but not always.” “Those are the people who are actually doing the work.” He said: “I’d point to someone in the back and say, you, what do you think? And they’d be shocked that I called on them.”