Steve Jobs discovered that meetings were a huge problem. Larry Page confirmed that solving it was not easy

He excess meetings At work it has been a obstacle to productivity For decades. Although today it is A very debated topicalready in 1986 Steve Jobs He identified him as one of the great enemies of efficiency in technology companies.

Decades later, Larry Page, co -founder of Google, also faced this problem by assuming CEO in Eric Schmidt replacement. At that time he realized the challenge of solving that problem without causing others Even worse.

Jobs and Page attempts to change the meetings culture They showed that, although the solutions seem simple, putting them into practice is much more complicated than it seems.

Steve Jobs and the problem of meetings

In 1986, Steve Jobs realized that frequent and unproductive meetings were negatively affecting the creativity and efficiency of the equipment, as recognized in the letters collected in the book ‘Make submission Wonderful‘.

Jobs noted that, instead of helping to advance, many of the meetings in Next They became a waste of timebraking innovation and quick decision making. Jobs promoted the idea of ​​minimizing meetings (and even prohibit them on Thursdays) and only call them when they were really necessary.

According to Jobs, The key I was to keep small and focused teams, avoiding large groups where most attendees did not contribute anything relevant. This philosophy later helped Apple maintain its agility and response capacity, in addition to inspiring the CEO of another great technological: Google.

Larry Page and the challenge of changing Google

In 2011, Larry Page took the command of Google as CEO, at a time when the company already had 30,000 employees and increasingly ambitious challenges.

Such and As I counted Jacob Votko, former employee of Google who lived in the first person those changes, Page realized that the excess meetings was affecting the company’s capacity To innovate quickly.

The former employee had an anecdote in the Larry Page had criticized large companies as Yahoo! Because it took weeks to update their main page, while in Google they did it in hours. However, now that Google had grown up, Page wondered if in a startup someone would be making jokes about the slow decision of Google.

To combat this problem, Larry Page He sent an email To the entire company with new Rules for meetings:

• Every meeting must have a “decision maker.”
• You can discuss issues, but once determined, each one executes them as if the decision were their own.
• Each meeting must have a clear purpose, structure and agenda. If you have nothing to contribute, don’t go
• All must be punctual, and pay full attention to the meeting (not other background tasks)
• Celebrate meetings in groups of less than 10 people and broadly spread the notes
• Establish a maximum duration of 50 minutes instead of an hour and respect those time limits

The difficulties of applying new rules

Although Page’s instructions were clear, Votko said that the implementation of these measures was not simple. Many employees continued to extend meetings until they were impossible for them to continue because others needed the room.

In fact, some teams even tried to take advantage of the 10 -minute holes between meetings to carry out rapid meetings in which they did not even sat, generating friction with users who extended their meetings beyond the regulatory 50 minutes.

According to published Business InsiderLarry Page established that no decision should wait for a meeting, and if it required a meeting, it should be summoned urgently. That generated some confusion and organizational chaos since it was interpreted as that these meetings had preference over others, demonstrating that changing such entrenched habits requires much more than simple rules.

To reinforce these changes, Larry Page divided Google into seven large groups of product, each with a clear person responsible. The goal was that each of them will act like a startup internal In this way, decision -making would be expedited and unnecessary bureaucracy and unnecessary meetings would be avoided.

More than a decade later, great technological ones try again apply the same recipes To prevent someone, in some startup, not get rid of his slowness When making decisions.

In Xataka | Working in Google was a dream for many. Paradise in the technology offices is now fading

Image | AppleFlickr (Niall Kennedy), Unspash (Rodeo Project Management Software)