People waste a lot of time discussing whether meetings are productive or counter-productive. Is that productive? And is my blogging about this topic productive?

Meetings are necessary. Period. It is neither good nor bad. Almost everyone here has been to a totally useless meeting. The converse is also true. It is the people and their agendas in the meetings that make or break the meetings.


I learnt a great deal from reading this BusinessWeek article on how Google runs its meetings. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president of search products, holds over 70 meetings in a week (that’s much more than the times I go to the water cooler in my office but I digress) and her six keys to successful meetings are as follows:

1. Firm yet flexible agenda: It sounds like an oxymoron but they have a firm but flexible agenda so that everyone has a clear focus on the topic of the meeting even though it is not cast in stone.
2. Take Notes: They have someone to take notes which is projected real-time so that any inaccuracies will be corrected immediately. These notes are circulated to those who missed the meeting.
3. Micro-Meetings: Mayer sets aside large blocks of time that is sliced into small chunks of 5 to 10 minutes for a particular subject or project. In this way, she has the flexibility to modify the agenda easily as well as accomodate more into the meetings.
4. Hold office hours: Like in a University, Mayer holds ‘office hours’ from 4PM everyday for 90 minutes and employees put their names on a board to see her in a first-come-first-served basis for about 7 minutes individually (on average).
5. Use data: Mayer believes in using data to make decisions in meetings along with a clear methodology of selecting designs, proposals and projects. In her opinion, this is a fair way to evaluate and shows no favourtism at all. I’m not sure whether I agree on this point of making decisions only objectively because I believe intuition is also important.
6. Time pressure: During meetings, a giant stopwatch counts down the minutes left in the meeting which ensures that meetings are on schedule.

Some related useful tools
Meeting Planner
Google Clock

Photo Credit: www.sxc.hu