How to Run a Meeting Like Google
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
There are times and places for highly-structured, decision-oriented meetings, but I often get the most value out of the least structured ones. Let's say marketing has a vague idea for Feature X -- "Make the homepage skinnable." What's it mean? What are everybody's goals? How muck work is involved in different variations of the idea? There's no way to seek truth though a pre-arranged agenda and a linear discussion with a timer. An outsider might regard such a meeting as chaos, but the change in collective understanding is usually immense.
Why are Americans so obsessed about structure, time, and faux efficiency? I'm all for getting stuff done when the definition of "done" is inclusive of everything important. However, making arbitrary decisions quickly so one can pat himself on the back for his efficiency is hardly an efficient path to just about anyone's definition of "done".
What's it mean? What are everybody's goals?
You still need a strong leader (whether formal or not) to actually ask these questions, maintain the right level of depth, and stay off irrelevant tangents.
I've heard that she is hated within the company for things like this. Maybe that's a minority view, but the article is still way too positive overall.
1. Set a firm agenda.
It also helps to have and frequently exercise unilateral veto or green light power. It's a lot easier to hold meetings in which you don't have to build consensus or even explain your decisions to the people whose year's work you are killing after just having heard of it half an hour before.
2. Assign a note taker.
Sucks to be the engineer who gets this task. Maybe my brain needs a second channel where I can actually think about what's happening and one to take the notes with. As it is, when I get to be the note taker I'm reduced to a speech-to-text machine with no agency in the room.
3. Carve out micro-meetings.
Once again, absolute power of the pen makes this a bit easier.
4. Hold office hours.
Nothing to complain about this one. Damn good idea. Wish I had the political capital to pull it off myself but it's hard to get people to buy into that when you are an IC. My workaround is to disappear from my desk a couple hours of each week to put my head down. Not as effective as "You can only talk to me between three and five on Wednesday, and by the way sign up two weeks in advance before all the slots are booked out," but we work with what we've got.
5. Discourage politics, use data.
That is, when it's beneficial to the point of view you already hold or when you don't care and just want to make a safe decision.
6. Stick to the clock.
Whatever. OK, I guess.
I'd also like to point out that none of these things happen in the vast majority of the meetings I attend. Normally it's agenda-free and the most senior person in charge wastes everyone's time by interrogating the tech lead about things that senior person should have read in the design document that was sent out the day before, and that besides that are higher resolution than the senior person rightly needs to know about, while everyone else sits around and checks email. Like meetings at any company.
1) That hosts and presenters supply relevant materials enough in advance to allow review, when said are not already available. Over 75% of internal meetings I've attended in the past some years have the agenda delivered via email less than 5 minutes before the meeting start. It may serve the CYA documentation requirement, but little else.
2) That attendees actually prep for the meeting. Sometimes, with a small and/or tight team, people already know the situation and are ready to put their heads together. Much more often, though, many enter the meeting with little or no knowledge of what it's about. (These are the same people who spent e.g. the previous hour schmoozing at each other's cubes.) 75% of the meeting time is spent rehashing what is already known, in an inefficient verbal format. Is it any wonder that those who are actually on top of things hate meetings?
Working on a good and conscientious team, I've been able to hold meetings that sometimes require only a few minutes and that break up as soon as the questions and information at hand are addressed. (Perhaps with a few minutes extra for a bit of humor and socialization, depending on schedules.) Outside of that context, I just stopped going to some meetings, when I could afford to.
Restated briefly, if you can't be bothered to document the topic, why should I go to your meeting and do it myself with a bunch of idle time and intermittent note-taking? And/or sit quietly while others catch up. (Or worse, I find myself repeatedly having to correct and clarify the host.) If/when you need my help badly enough, you'll start being more efficient (and respectful).
Of course, this attitude does not go over so well, politically. Which is probably a good sign to start looking for the next gig.
She might see herself as rational and efficient, but to a lot of people she comes across as rude, insecure, and worst of all: horribly inconsistent.
She practices a sort of "off with their heads" style of management and loves the sound of her own voice. She will often interrupt people before they have had the chance to communicate even a fraction of what they have prepared for meetings, often spewing forth cascades of unpleasantness as she argues against what she thinks the messenger intends to say.
Very often the upshot of a meeting is that people are more confused as to what her intentions are than they were before the meeting.
She often sends teams in one direction, and then later, yells at them for going in that direction and sends them in a new direction. She seems to have very weak memory for what decisions she has made in the past. People rarely (if ever?) point this out to Marissa.
She also seems to be quite terrible at managing her staff. She is unable to delegate meaningfully, and if something is OK'ed by one of her reportees you essentially have nothing: there is a complete disconnect so you need to get it from Marissa directly. You also need to verify with her frequently to make sure that you catch it when she suddenly changes her mind.
Due to her foul mood, people rarely, if ever, speak up and tell her when she is being an ass or that she is contradicting herself. Again. The reason is that Marissa will have people people removed if they annoy her. I've seen this happen. I've seen people get thrown off projects just for saying something that annoyed the cupcake princess in a meeting.
That she supposedly schedules 70+ meetings/week is sufficient evidence of this. I suppose this is one definition of a "flat" organization though.
And this is not related to the main article.
This thinking in general is a decent idea, but Google I think goes too far -- my data for this opinion is the "utility" feel of the products they create, as you said.
They're useful, but there's no free lunch: this methodology has its own set of tradeoffs. I thought I could be brief in explaining this thought but I guess not considering the downvotes.