How Google holds its meetings

The phrase “Inter­net time” became pop­u­lar in the mid 1990s, as dot-coms worked at an an accel­er­ated pace. This is an effec­tive way to raise addi­tional bar­ri­ers to entry in an indus­try. If com­peti­tors and new entrants believe that their rivals can work faster, they will either cede this com­pet­i­tive advan­tage to the lead­ers, or try to work faster and make speed a key suc­cess fac­tor (KSF).

Marissa Mayer, VP of search tech­nol­ogy at Google, presents her tac­tics for hold­ing effec­tive meet­ings. She hold 70 meet­ings a week as she guides Google’s core business.

In a shop like Google (GOOG), much of the work takes place in meet­ings, and [Mayer’s] goal is to make sure teams have a firm man­date, strate­gic direc­tion, and action­able infor­ma­tion, while mak­ing par­tic­i­pants feel moti­vated and respected.

Here are some ideas I culled from two Busi­ness Week arti­cles):

Set a firm agenda

Assign some­one to take notes.

A Google meet­ing fea­tures a lot of dis­plays. On one wall, a pro­jec­tor dis­plays the pre­sen­ta­tion, while right next to it, another pro­jec­tor shows the tran­scrip­tion of the meet­ing. (Yet another dis­plays a 4-foot image of a tick­ing stop­watch.) Google exec­u­tives are big believ­ers in cap­tur­ing an offi­cial set of notes, so inac­cu­ra­cies and incon­sis­ten­cies can be caught immediately.

Carve out micro-meetings

Mayer sched­ules meet­ings that are 5 or 10 min­utes long.

Hold office hours

Mayer met Google’s co-founders dur­ing her office hours in Stan­ford University’s com­puter sci­ence depart­ment in the late ‘90s. Her cur­rent office hours start at 4 PM every day:

Many of our most tech­no­log­i­cally inter­est­ing prod­ucts have shown up dur­ing office hours. Google News, Orkut [Google’s social net­work­ing site], Google Reviews, and Google Desk­top all showed up first in office hours.” Dur­ing office hours, Mayer can get through up to 15 meet­ings, aver­ag­ing seven min­utes per person.

Dis­cour­age office pol­i­tics — use data

See this Busi­ness Week link for some back­ground. Mayer has made the approval process highly quan­ti­ta­tive, based on stan­dard met­rics that employ­ees and man­agers must use. The phrase “I like…” is discouraged.

Stick to the clock

Google meet­ings include a pro­jected stop­watch on a screen. But don’t be a slave to the clock — it’s a helper, not a driver.

Tagged as: businessweek, Google, management, software, teaching, time