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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.