How to Run a Meeting Like Google | Hacker News Reader

How to Run a Meeting Like Google

businessweek.com

22 pointsjamesjyu20 comments

I sent this out to my colleagues two years ago and they took it as an insult. The real problem is that meetings are an inefficient form of communication. I once had to sit through a weekly around the room status meeting where everyone tried to shine in front of the boss and brag about what they had been doing- for two hours! That's 5% of my supposed 40 hours per week being subjected to others bloviating about their accomplishments. I used to beg for timeboxing on certain people, but it was never enforced. I started dialing into the meeting on my cellphone from my desk so I could at least work. We even tried to make the meeting into a daily update blog or something, but the idiot manager liked to gather all of his subjects into the room and hold court once a week.

I like the board meetings I run. We talk about an issue for a designated period of time, and then we vote on it. Closed. Meetings without a clearly defined decision process tend not to make any decisions.

That's nothing. At my last job we used to have weekly 'status' meetings that always turned into 3-4 hour fantasy brainstorming sessions about all the fantastic features we could someday add to our product. Since I have pretty low tolerance for unpleasant activities that are a complete waste of time I would usually lose my fucking mind near hour 2 and then storm out of the meeting to go back to work.

At least at your job people really accomplished things worth bragging about rather than just sitting around and talking endlessly about all the great things they could imagine themselves accomplishing.

I worked at Google. Most meetings had way too many people in them, and 90% of the people would sitting around using their laptops through them, attempting to tune in when it was relevant. It wasn't really all that efficient. Marissa's very special meetings were run in a special way, and were more efficient, but teams meticulously prepared for their 5 minutes with her.

I wonder if you could take "micro meetings" even further? Can you replace many meetings with something akin to an open market? For example, instead of having a meeting to decide which database back end to use, if you can, just use all of them. Toyota took a trial approach with their hybrid drivetrain. They actually had something like 10 independent projects and picked the best one.

Building a car probably costs more in production than in design, so you could afford to have several design projects. But building software is nearly nothing but design... I couldn't imagine building 3 DB backend with 1/3 the programmers workforce each and still making a profitable product.

Sometimes not deciding anything is good though. If instead of basing an app strongly on a specific library/platform/etc., you program something fairly generic and get to decide later, the more power to you.

I can imagine lots of big companies doing this with internal software and coming out way ahead. Instead, they bet all of their money on one bug uber project, and it comes out bloated and mediocre.

In the startup space, the entire company can be one trial project. You don't need a meeting because one person can just decide what they're going to use.

I think some time ago, Microsoft used to have two different internal versions of Word, for example... the one which was better won, and was the one used by people.

Yep, lots of people already do this -- it's called A/B testing.

Isn't this how any meeting is supposed to be run?

Meetings should be kept short and to the point. Unfortunately, meetings in most companies aren't anywhere close to this. At my former job, some meetings took more than 2-3 hours, with way too many people at the table, many of them who didn't factor into whatever we were discussing. Most of the time, we ended the meeting being farther away from our objective than when we began the meeting.

Supposed to, yes. But few companies have a person who's job is as specialised as hers. Google is about efficiency and her job is to keep the meetings efficient and organized.

I can't tell you how much I hate the meetings I have to go that devolve into time wasting because there's no agenda etc.

Actually any project manager worth their pay knows they should be doing this.

But even if they do, odds are they're going to run into problems of just trying to schedule meetings in the first place (hence regular, weekly meetings even if there's nothing to discuss), people unprepared even if an agenda is provided, and not having enough political clout to make sure that the everyone who needs to be there actually is or to shut someone up who's wasting time.

Mayer is in a position where she's not handicapped with those issues. Most executives wouldn't be either. The question would be are the rest of the meetings at Google this efficient?

In addition to various ad hoc meetings we current have:

- a daily status meeting

- a weekly department meeting

- a weekly one on one

- a weekly status report

- an end of sprint status report

We also use an issue tracking system which records the status of everything we are working on.

And how's that working out for you? What percentage of your time is spent in meetings? How much in preparing for meetings?

My favorite part of Google meeting philosophy is that meetings almost never go longer than an hour. If you're meeting for more than an hour, break it up into smaller meetings, and most people shouldn't have to go to both of them.

Meetings seem to be pointless. If everyone answered my emails and CCed everyone else, I could go a year without meetings.

If all of your questions can be answered by replying to your email you must have a very easy job. You know the kind that computers will be doing soon.

Meetings are not only about hearing what data other pople present and presenting your own. The reason you have meetings is that you can look someone in the eye and ask them if they will really be able to ship on monday. The answer will often be different than if you send an e-mail.

Running a good meeting is about people and psychology.

If someone needs to see you in the eyes to deliver an honest answer, then you probably do not need them in your company.

It's not about being honest - I've been to many meetings with talented people that thought they had everything under control but looking at their reactions and behaviour yeilded another answer. These people were deeply honest, they just hadn't seen all the perspectives and ramifications of what they were doing, or were a bit too positive. Good managers know this and use it productively - it is one of the primary functions of meetings.

This probably touches on one of the big differences between engineer types and business types - engineers think it's all about technology and business types think it's all about people. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

My point is that the communication you do in a meeting is very very different from the communication you get from e-mail. Psychologists have found that when you interact with people up to 90% of the communication is non-verbal. This means that the bandwidth of talking face-to-face is ten times as high as sending an e-mail.

There's a pretty interesting wikipedia entry on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-verbal_communication

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