šThe best kind of meeting
Conditions affect everything, including meetings. Amazon notably has employees write up their ideas in a document and share that before the meeting rather than another slide deck. Weāve seen people praise Zoomās time limit (on the free plan) because it forces the end of the meeting. We know that extroverts dominate debates.
It goes to reason then that changing the meeting conditions will change the meeting outcomes. Should meetingsā¦
be first thing or after lunch?
be in-person, voice only, or video?
include brainstorms, or should that be before?
be walking or seated?
be capped in time?
include physical reminders, like how one CEO had a toy stuffed elephant in the corner of the room?
Thereās no secret recipe for meeting success.
In the early days of Google, co-founder Sergey Brin had a hard stop on meetings. Heād walk into a meeting, set a timer, discuss the topic at hand, and leave when the timer dinged.
One such meeting was figuring out a name for Google Map views. At the time, the team called the fly-over view āsatellite viewā. This wasnāt technically true because many of the perspectives were from airplanes, not a satellites.
To save space, one engineer changed āaerial photographyā to ābird modeā.
So, in walks Brin to find a better name. The engineering and marketing teams go back and forth with Brin. The timer dings with nothing better than ābird modeā and out walks the co-founder of Google.
What happened next?