Meeting like Google

In the current commercial operation, the word "meeting" has a bad reputation, because there are very few achievements in the form of meeting. I remember a cartoon painted by Dilbert: several people sat around the table, and the conference organizer said, "Today's meeting has no special agenda. As usual, we just need to complain and make some irrelevant speeches ".

Now the meeting is basically like this. Most of the meetings are unordered, passionate, and inefficient. However, our meetings can be better organized.

When I decided to write an article about how to hold a meeting, I found Marissa Mayer (vice president of Google search products, see businessweek.com, 6/19/06, "Marissa Mayer: the talent scout "), among the people I know, she has the most extensive knowledge in meetings, and she leads the creation of some of today's most innovative products, this also gave me a lot of points for her talent in organizing the meeting.

On average, Mayer holds about 70 meetings each week... Else RZ ...), As the last level, Google engineers and project managers can present and promote their ideas to Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. A total of eight teams composed of directors, managers and engineers report to Mayer at various stages of product development.

In a company like Google, most of the work is carried out in meetings. Mayer's goal is to ensure that her team has clear work instructions, strategic directions, and information that is sufficient to support the action, at the same time, they feel motivated and respected to move forward. The six secrets of Mayer's successful efficient meeting are:

1. Have a clear agenda

Mayer requires that each meeting have a clear agenda covering the outline of the issues that the participants wish to discuss and how they will make the most effective use of their time. Of course, the agenda requires some flexibility. Mayer thinks that the agenda is more of a tool that plays such a role: the Agenda forces participants to think carefully about what they want to achieve at the meeting and how best to achieve it.

2. Specify a special note-taker (sweetriver Note: it is not the same as our "Conference Recorder" in general)

A major feature of Google's Conference is that there are many projections ...... The current presentation is projected on one side of the wall, and a projector is next to it to display the notes of the current meeting (sweetriver note: In the original article, we should not only find a dedicated conference recorder, special projection is also required to display the notes of the current meeting in real time to ensure that participants can reach a true agreement at the meeting ), there may also be a projection next to a timer that is 4 feet high !! Google executives believe that by making an official note, they can eliminate inaccuracy and inconsistency to the greatest extent possible.

Those who failed to attend the meeting will receive a meeting note. When someone tries to think back to the decisions of the Meeting, the direction of the team, and what needs to be done next, they can have such a standard official record for reference.

3. carve out micro-MEETING)

Mayer leaves a large number of small segments to attend meetings with specific topics or projects. For example, in her 2-hour weekly meeting with founder and CEO Eric Schmidt, she will take 5-10 minutes (or longer, depending on the subject ), participate in meetings in specific areas, such as weekly meetings on site performance and new product release.

In case of any emergency, this approach gives Mayer sufficient flexibility to adjust the agenda before the meeting. This gradually makes the meeting more important. Mayer also adopts the same strategy for her team members, which is more about 5-10 minutes of short communication (the shortest time allowed by her schedule) than a 30-minute long talk. In this way, she can get more results by taking part in the meeting during a large period of time.

Mayer has background experience in engineering and computer science, and is self-ridiculed that these micro-meetings are "Reducing latency in the pipeline ). That is to say, if one of her employees wants to discuss a problem with her, the employee can schedule a 10-minute micro-meeting with her at a large time block in Mayer, instead of waiting for her next idle 30 minutes-these 30 minutes may be less than two weeks.

4. hold office hours.
You can refer to this Article in Harvard Business Review. In fact, it is similar to the concept of "Q & A time", that is, a person stays in the office at a fixed time, so that you can find him and communicate with him during this time. This "Q & A Time" allows you to get closer to your employees, learn more about the affairs in the company, have more opportunities to listen to opinions and new idea, and handle lower-level problems more effectively., in particular, you will not be the kind of untouchable human that you will never see. I didn't come up with a good Chinese phrase to express this meaning, so I will keep the English below.

This secret of Mayer comes from her experience as a computer science instructor at Stanford and she met two founders of Google at Stanford. Mayer's office hour starts at four o'clock P.M. every day, one and a half hours each time.

The employee writes their names on a whiteboard outside her office, and then processes the queue in FIFO mode. Sometimes PM needs her approval at a marketing activity. Sometimes it is an idea or design (see businessweek.com, 6/30/06, "inside Google's new-product process ").

Mayer said: "Many of our interesting products are made in this office hour. Google News, Orkut [Google's social networking site: here, the author adds an English comment to Orkut. It seems that Orkut is relatively weak ~~), Idea of Google reviews, and Google Desktop is the first such office hour ". In this short one and a half hours of office hour, Mayer can hold up to 15 meetings, with an average of 7 minutes for each person .......

5. Data and Politics (discourage politics, use data)
One of the nine "Nine notions of innovation" Mayer once talked about is "data, not politics" (see businessweek.com, 6/19/06, "9 notions of innovation ").

In a company, if the boss makes a decision based on his preferences, rather than his objective thoughts on products and designs, if the attendees will feel that the boss will give a green light to the design of the person they like, then this opinion is very necessary.

Mayer believes that such a value tends to bring down employee morale, so she turns the approval process (approval process) into science. Google selects a good design based on some specific metrics. The choice is based on values and facts, rather than personal relationships (designs are chosen based on merit and evidence, not personal relationships ).

Mayer does not want to hear sentences like "I like" at design meetings, such as "I like the way the screen looks ". She will encourage comments like "He experimentation on the site shows that his design was med 10% better. Google is built on the corporate culture driven by customer feedback, rather than on the internal politics (many companies are now), so for Google, "Data, politics" works.

6. Stick to the clock.
In order to add pressure to the Meeting to keep the attention of the participants, Google's rally usually projects a huge timer on the wall, countdown to specific meetings or topics ...... This is really a timer that can be downloaded from the Internet. It runs on the PC and projects it to 4 feet.

Think about the situation outside the conference room. It must be crazy: There are several images projected on the wall at the same time: presentation, trancoder (2nd entries), and then there is a mega-timer! However, in Google, it makes sense, introduce the structure in creative chaos !! This timer brings a slight sense of pressure to the Meeting to keep the meeting on schedule.

Mayer also has a piece of advice for this Timer: maintain a healthy sense of humor for timer. (At the same time, it's almost time for me to interview Mayer, but Mayer turned timer into an interesting and friendly reminder, rather than being rude to interrupt our conversation .)

Remember that these meeting skills are useful in Google. Although it may not apply to your company, these six secrets should give you some good inspiration on how to make meetings more effective and free of time.