Act One:
In the 1850s, the medical community stumbled upon a curious class of men in Austria. Nicknamed the poison eaters, these individuals consumed arsenic as a way to improve their complexion and enhance their sexual vigor. For the uninitiated, arsenic is a mineral long understood to be a huge risk to human health. Relatively small doses (<4mg) can prove fatal to humans and even exposure to the element can cause cancer.
As a result, nineteenth century doctors were naturally shocked to hear eyewitness accounts documenting this weird group of men living in rural Austria. These men seemed to be living healthy, vigorous lives despite their arsenic habit. Many theories were put forward to rationalize this disconnect. No single theory won the day. Ultimately, the scientific community settled on the idea that eating the compound regularly had helped these individuals develop immunity.
Modern day scientists (and historians) are less benevolent to this explanation. The poison eaters were not so special after all. As it turns out arsenic is okay for consumption in small quantities for short periods of time. However, the drug takes it toll on its user severely harming their physical and mental health. Numerous scientific studies have now unequivocally rejected the idea of their being any way to develop arsenic immunity. Any apparent immunity might is also temporary - even the act of stopping arsenic consumption (once started) can also cause an individual to die from complications.
The story of poison eaters has many parallels in the business world. Many companies remain mired in micro-transgressions - decisions that individually seem minor and inconsequential - but over time they can kill a company. I will focus on one such decision today: the practice of excessive/pointless meetings.
Act Two:
A few months ago, I found myself at a dinner table with a bunch of senior executives. The topic of conversation turned to interviews. Someone posed a question around the tactic people adopted when they were five minutes into an interview and already knew that the candidate wasn’t their guy. Everyone (including me) chimed in and a few interesting anecdotes followed. The discussion then turned to time management and how it was frustrating that a lot of time was wasted during interview processes. Rationally speaking, the interviewer and the interviewee would be better off if you end the interview early. And yet, due to social conventions we continue the conversation until we are close to the allotted interview time.
Later that night, I reflected back on everyone’s answers and wondered what everyone’s response might have been to a slightly different question:
“What do you do when you are five minutes into a group meeting and realize that the meeting isn’t helpful and/or your presence adds no value to the meeting?”
After all, most of us spend on average only a few hours interviewing each month. On the other hand, we dedicate a few hours to meetings every single day.
This is one area where startups are naturally at a huge advantage. When you are a handful of people, you don’t need to go through multiple decision layers to iterate an idea or decision. That is why small teams have such amazing product release cycles. Larger tech companies have realized this point and set up their organizations to reduce communication and meeting hangover.
Over a year ago, Elon Musk sent an email to all Tesla employees encouraging them to ‘walk out of meetings’ where they felt the meeting wasn’t going anywhere. He subsequently shared a set of productivity tips in a following email. Here are the bits relating to meetings:
As a no-bs guy, this is perhaps the kind of thing you’d expect Musk to say. What is really refreshing is that he said this in a direct email to employees. And didn’t try to make the point indirectly at a media or podcast appearance.
Jeff Bezos is another venerated executive known to have a disdain for general meetings. The decision around creating ‘two-pizza teams’ at Amazon isn’t just about multi-skill teams. Two-pizza teams are about decentralization and how small teams require less communication overhead. In Amazon’s early years, there was a discussion at an offsite around ways to improve the company. Someone suggested ‘more communication’ as an easy win for the company. Bezos’ response? ‘No, communication is terrible’. Obviously, Bezos doesn’t actually believe that. However, he as he subsequently explained he wasn’t a fan of communication because it didn’t scale. Ultimately, two-pizza teams work well because they require fewer meetings.
One popular myth of the genre is the mantra ‘over-communication is better’. By passing communication as a virtue, it increases the number of meetings. For an employee, there is nothing more deceptive than a day spent filled with meetings. You might think you’ve earned your day’s dues. However, if you have just been a passive passenger in most of these meetings, did you really achieve anything that day? Most crucially, meetings eat into one’s ability to do meaningful, deep work. Paul Graham has a brilliant essay on this topic. Here is the juicy bit:
Reading Paul’s essay was a real eye opener for me. I mostly work on the manager’s schedule. Which is okay but it is important for me to appreciate that not everyone operates on the schedule. Even a simple meeting request might eat into a developer’s day. I plan to keep Paul’s essay pinned to my desk and to return to it from time to time.
Act Three:
Since you have made it thus far, I assume that you are now convinced that meetings are inherently evil and must be e̶r̶a̶d̶i̶c̶a̶t̶e̶d̶ reduced. You might be tempted to ask - what can be done? Well, look no further. Here are a few simple hacks that have worked for the residents of Sand Hill Road that you might adopt at your own company:
Recognize that the root cause of many meetings is organizational turnover. Since people are often changing teams and new individuals within teams often don’t know each other, over-communicating is a relatively ‘safe’ approach in lieu of staying quiet and appearing a dumb, useless rock. Three things can be done to prevent this:
using asynchronous communication tools like Slack across the organization so that there is a repository of previous communication around topics. New team members can then immediately get up to speed on previous discussions.
establishing a culture of documentation. It is no surprise that some of the best tech organizations like Stripe also place so much emphasis on hiring people who write well. Unsurprisingly, Stripe’s API documentation is amazingly comprehensive and beautiful.
creating a user guide about yourself so that others can immediately know your working style and don’t have to schedule meetings just as a safe way to over-communicate. (Read this post for more context around creating a user guide - I frankly find this last one a bit wonkish but it seems to have gained decent traction in Silicon Valley so there might be something to it)
Use YCombinator’s methodology of holding dedicated office hours in late afternoons/evenings only. Admittedly, this isn’t a fully scaleable solution. But it does work for individual meetings. And it frees up a lot more time for people to do focused, uninterrupted work during the day.
Forcing anyone who sends a meeting invite to include a short paragraph describing the purpose of the meeting. Often this simple act can weed out people who are including you on invites for the sake of increasing communication. Many things can also then be immediately resolved over email preventing the need to block off thirty minutes off someone’s time.
Charging employees $100 per hour (from team budgets) to use conference rooms. Disco is a Japanese company that did just that and has witnessed worker productivity improve quite significantly as a result. Read this Bloomberg piece for the full account.
Buy company-wide subscription to simple SaaS tools like Calendly to schedule meetings. Even the act of scheduling meetings lingers on for days and often requires coordination between multiple individuals and their secretaries. Having a tool like Calendly allows external and internal folks to see the open slots in your calendar.
Last but not least, companies must make an active effort to move away from having a ‘meeting’ culture. As remote work gains steam and physical workspaces become less relevant for hiring talent, companies tied in to this legacy could find themselves at a huge disadvantage. But this is a separate topic for a future blogpost on remote work.
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