How To Run Your Meetings Like Apple and Google

by Sean Blanda

Careers have been built on poking fun at meetings. From commercials to comic strips it's no secret that most of us would rather be, you know, working.But there's good news: Rapid experimentation with meetings in the past decade by startups and Fortune 500 companies alike has produced a new set of rules to consider. Here are three that seem to be universal:  

1. All meetings must have a stated purpose or agenda. Without an agenda, meetings can easily turn into aimless social gatherings rather than productive working sessions.
2. Attendees should walk away with concrete next steps or Action Items.We love Action Items here, but we're not the only ones. From Apple to the Toastmasters, the world's most successful organizations demand that attendees leave meetings with actionable tasks.
3. The meeting should have an end time. Constraints breed creativity. By not placing an endtime, we encourage rambling, off-topic and useless conversation.

Of course, there's no need to stop there. Truly productive companies always continue tweaking to suit their specific culture. Here are a few highlights:

Apple

During the Steve Jobs era, Apple constantly worked to stay true to its startup roots while becoming the largest company in the world.

• Every project component or task has a "DRI." According to Fortune's Adam Lashinsky, Apple breeds accountability at meetings by having a Directly Responsible Individual whose name appears next to all of the agenda items they are responsible for. With every task tagged, there's rarely any confusion about who should be getting what done.
• Be prepared to challenge and be challenged. There are dozens of tales about Jobs' ability to aggresively question his employees, sometimes moving them to tears. While you probably don't need the waterworks at your office, everyone should be willing to defend their ideas and work from honest criticism. If a person has no ideas to defend, they shouldn't be at the meeting.

Catalyst

Catalyst, a group of young Christian leaders in the South, places an emphasis on keeping meetings positive and loose. Some examples:

• The answer is always "yes, and..." and never "no, but..." Keep things positive and ideas flowing by not shouting down initial proposals.
• Take a break every 30 minutes. If your meeting must last longer than a half hour, make sure attendees can get up, walk out of the room and put their brain on pause.
• Think and dream with out limitations. Those come later.

Google

In a recent issue of "Think With Google," Google VP of Business Operations Kristen Gil described how the company spent 2011 getting back to its original values as a startup, which included reconsidering how the company approached meetings. Some takeaways:

• All meetings should have a clear decision maker. Gil credits this approach to helping the Google+ team ship over 100 new features in the 90 days after launch.
• No more than ten people at a meeting. "Attending meetings isn't a badge of honor," she writes.
• Decisions should never wait for a meeting. Otherwise, the velocity of the company is slowed to its meeting schedule. If a meeting needs to happen for something to get done, hold the meeting as soon as possible.
• Kill ideas, and meetings. After Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt as Google CEO, the company quickly killed its Buzz, Code Search, and Desktop products so it could focus more resources on less efforts. Focus has to permeate every aspect of a company, including meetings.

37Signals

If it were up to 37 Signals, there would be no meetings at all and discussion would be limited to IM and email. In the company's best-selling book Rework, they urge creatives to remember that "every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead." In fact, the firm even created National Boycott a Meeting Day in 2011. But if you absolutely must meet, they have three rules:

• Keep it short. No, shorter than that. And use a timer to enforce the time limit.
• Have an agenda.
• Invite as few people as possible.

Reily

This New Orleans-based food and beverage company was profiled in the book Good Boss, Bad Boss by Robert Sutton. The company utilizes "stand up" meetings made popular for the Agile method of software development.

• Schedule the meetings for the same time. Keeping employees in a rhythm allows them to not have their work unexpectedly disrupted.
• The stand up is to communicate, not solve. If your team has a regularly planned stand up meeting, "lack of communication" is no longer an excuse for problems. Just be sure to protect the stand up meeting time by deferring larger discussions to private meetings.

(BTW: If you're interested in the nitty-gritty of the stand up meeting, Jason Yip wrote an entire manual.)

Technically Media

Not exactly Apple or Google, but at my previous company, Technically Media, we worked hard to make meetings as useful as possible. We met only once a week to update one another on progress, propose new ideas and hammer out any problems. We kept to an extremely strict time table and meeting structure as detailed by my fellow co-founder Christopher Wink on his personal blog. Some key observations:

• There is no judging in brainstorming. Focus on capturing ideas before filtering and critiquing them.
• Bring solutions, not problems. Solutioning in the middle of a meeting wastes precious communication time. If you can't bring proposed solutions to the table, save it for next time or bring it up in private conversations.
• Review "homework" from the last meeting. Not only does it remind participants what happened last week, it holds attendees accountable.

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What's Your Approach?

How does your organization run its meetings? 

Any unusual tips or suggestions you'd like to share?

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Sean Blanda is the Associate Editor and Producer of 99U. He previously founded Technically Media in Philadelphia. You can find him on Twitter: @SeanBlanda.

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Imago Life Workshop

Imago Life Workshop & Love feast is a capacity building / team bonding event organised by the Teen Ministry Alaka Foursquare Gospel Church, Surulere, Lagos, Nigeria. The event  debuts on Monday October 1, 2012. Over 400 teenagers are expected to be in attendance. The Workshop will feature seasoned facilitators with appeal for young people, the sessions will be very engaging and interactive as issues on Decision Making, Social Etiquette, Planning and Friendship would be on the front burner. You don't want to miss out on this. Imago Life Workshop is the event of the moment and if you are young, vibrant, forward-looking, passionate, enterprising- then October 1 should be blocked out of your diary for the event. There will also be other side attractions like music, dance and plenty of food and drinks. It's sure going to be a full blown variety menu- as the different teen groups from various local assemblies across the District would be coming with very sumptuous delicacies to give the event color and verve. Get on the event page on Facebook, like the event and add yourself to the invitees!    

I believe!

I believe life is a journey of discovery; a discovery of our own essence as a being created in God's image with a purpose. As we walk this journey, we have the duty to keep cultivating our minds to release our God-given potentials for impact and significance for today and tomorrow. This is my persuasion and that is why I believe I have the mandate to impact my generation with a swift but steady response to the need of the times; to nurture value, build leadership and embed the culture of excellence and evolve a community of visionaries. I am not just perceptive of the ensuing obligation; I am equally persuaded and passionate about my mission. That is why I avail myself of the principles of process and the demands of growth. 

There’s more to you than the world thinks

Your identity is whatever makes you definable and recognizable as a distinct personality. It describes your individuality. It is the condition of being yourself and not another: Put in other words, your identity consists of more or less of what makes you unique as an individual and different from others.  It is simply the way you see or define yourself, or the network of values and convictions that structure your life.

As you go through the passage of life, you’ll discover that you are exposed to a myriad of influences that is likely to redefine your individuality. Society would most likely want to define you by the color of your skin, the shape and size of your frame, the wads of cash in your family’s bank account, and by a number of reasons that have no bearing on your inherent values. Once you allow yourself to be lured into living up to such extraneous pressures, you are surely going to lose your individuality. What usually happens is that other people’s opinion becomes your reality. Your whole life becomes a summation of what people say or think. You definitely don’t want to live that way.

Psychology tells you that as you transit from adolescence to adulthood you are likely to have an identity crisis.  This in the opinion of Erik Erikson is the stage of psychosocial development when you begin to quest for answers about the nature of your being and the search for an identity. You go through internal conflicts resulting from your physical growth, sexual maturation, and the integration of your ideas of yourself and about what others think of you. This is the point at which you form your self-image as you take on the grueling task of resolving the crisis of your “basic ego identity”.    

According to Erikson those who emerge from this stage with a strong sense of identity are well equipped to face adulthood with confidence and certainty. “Those who fail to achieve a cohesive identity-who experience an identity crisis-will exhibit a confusion of roles,” not knowing who they are, where they belong, or where they want to go. This sort of unresolved crisis leaves individuals struggling to “find themselves.” They may go on to seek a negative identity, which may involve crime or drugs or the inability to make defining choices about the future.

Why struggling to find yourself within the context of a twisted world? Your true identity is not in what the world thinks or says about you. It is not about how dark or f air you are; it is not about how tall or short you are, neither is it about how fat or slim you are; it is not about how waded you are; it is not about whether or not you school abroad; it is not about whether you live in AJ city or VG city. A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

Your true identity is in the word of God. The bible says you are created in the image and likeness of God. Do you know what that means? You have God’s DNA in you. You are His semblance and His representative. No peer pressure can change that. No societal whim can contest that. No psychology can analyze it. That you share God’s nature is a fundamental reality.  You have been given great and precious promises. These are the promises that enable you to share his divine nature and escape the world's corruption caused by human desires. (2 Peter 1:4) Sharing Jesus’ nature gives you an edge over life’s oddities. When you come to terms with this reality, it makes you feel more than a conqueror. It propels you to want to achieve more. It gives you the confidence to aspire higher.  It makes you want to live life to the fullest. It is a reality that reveals the root of your identity.

When you understand that your identity takes its source from God- you cannot be intimidated by anyone or anything. You have no reason to feel inferior or disadvantaged. The bible says, ‘it is in Him we live and move and have our being’. What more do you need to be assured of your identity?  John puts it this way, “You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. (1 John 4:4) Wow! Have you thought about this? There’s actually more to you than the world thinks. It means the world cannot contain you. You have a superior configuration because ‘the greater One’ is in you. You can’t be cowed, bullied, or rubbished.

It is exciting to know that your identity is in God, but knowledge is not enough. What you do with this knowledge is what counts. If you are going to maintain your identity in Him then you need to get back to His word. You need the word to keep renewing your mind. What does the word say? ‘Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’ (Rom 12:2) As you read, study, and meditate the word of God, you exchange all the funny ideas you have about yourself and your identity with God’s superior idea. Gradually you are being transformed into a better you. The word formats the hard disk of your twisted mind and installs in wonderful applications for a better life and a glorious destiny.