Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Free Pass to Defrag

We are giving away one free pass to the Defrag Conference in Denver next week. If you are interested, please comment on this post with both why you need it and how your participation will make the event even better.

Meeting Hell

Meetings are a big productivity killer that you can control by working together better.  Studies have shown the cost of meetings, you probably spend a week per month in meetings, and you can calculate your own cost of meetings. The issue isn't just where you spend your team's time, but how you spend it. Vinnie Mirchandani, following my post in Forbes on Email Hell, points out the productivity problem isn't just email.

The other big productivity killer in corporations is meetings. I am constantly surprised to see too many of my client employees just go from meeting to meeting - then, of course come back to their desks to handle the deluge of email!

Like email, improving meeting productivity requires more than personal tactics.  Through leadership, the behavior of the group must change.  This distinction is critical in our current climate.  Companies need to make do with less -- and doing so cannot be done through personal productivity gains -- but with efficient and effective coordination and collaboration of teams, the organization as a whole, and how partners and customers intersect.

Changing meetings is difficult because nowhere does company culture manifest itself, if not define itself, than through meetings.  The meeting culture of some companies puts a premium on presentation, or cooperation to consensus, or conflict as creativity.  Research has even shown that most meetings are status contests.  Beyond this theater as a disclaimer, here is some practical advice to make meetings more effective and efficient:

Do I need to be there?

Without a criteria for who should attend meetings, the attendee list tends to grow.  Not only does having more people in the meeting effect the productivity of the meeting, but it keeps people from working on other things.  Put responsibility for this criteria upon the person calling the meeting, as they have the greatest odds of abusing it.

Share notes

At the beginning of every meeting, ensure that someone is taking notes and how they will be shared.  Better yet, have an established practice for how this is done in every meeting.  Sharing notes can help decrease the attendee list for efficiency sake.  How notes are taken can make the group more effective:

• Consider having the note taker project while taking notes.  This clarifies and gains support for what was said and what is agreed to. 
• Take notes in a wiki to make it easy to link to supporting materials, pass editing control to others, share while taking and makes the notes searchable and discoverable alongside other knowledge.
• Don't aim for meeting minutes, encourage summarization, but try to capture as much as possible.  The great thing about meeting notes is that they carry with them the context of an event.  Small things said may mean a lot in the future. For example, someone might contribute an alternative point of view that wasn't part of what might be the summary, but when someone finds it outside the meeting they can contact the person to further explore it.
• Focus on next steps.  Conclude meetings with agreement on what was learned and the action items.

One tendency I have seen is to constrict note sharing for sake of politics.  Sometimes this necessary, but the instinct for control tends to hamper productivity.  For example, if division heads need to meet on an HR issue and craft a message for broader consumption, sometimes the meeting owner controls the notes.  Always share notes with meeting attendees and have a protocol for how they will be shared further.

What's the goal?

A meeting without a clear goal shouldn't exist.  Goals help focus conversation, but also ensure time is being spent towards the right outcome.

The most unproductive outcome of a meeting is having another meeting.  Usually because of unclear goal setting.  Unfortunately, meetings are autopoietic, meaning they self-propagate.  The only time a meeting should lead to another meeting is if that is the up front goal (let's plan the annual sales kickoff, or let's divide the strategic planning we need to accomplish into these three meetings).

What's the agenda?

The structure of an agenda should support accomplish the goal of the meeting.  One challenge is trying to limit agenda items while everyone has their own agendas and need to be heared.  One of the quickest produtivity gains available is to perform agenda setting in a wiki beforehand.  Be sure you bring people's attention to the agenda as it changes.  Link to supporting materials so everyone arrives at the meeting not only understanding the goal, but understands the subject matter behind each agenda item.

Will this ever end?

Always have a firm start time and end time for meetings.  Notice that when meetings have a firm end time, and you get close to it, suddenly the meeting becomes more productive?  Consider how time as a constraint can provide focus for conversation.  Consider trying that hour long meeting in 30 minutes.

Identify Subgroups

Before a meeting, consider if a subgroup of attendees can better discuss and decide or recommend a course of action.  During a meeting recognize when the conversation really is for a subset of attendees, and if time allows, table the conversation until the subgroup can work it out.

Standup Meetings

One of the best practices businessfolk can adapt from agile software development methodologies is the standup meeting.  Have the team meet daily for 5-15 minutes to synch on status.  Sometimes this is done litterally standing up, which gives even the most diligent of soldiers a stake in ending the meeting before they pass out.  Each team member takes a turn updating everyone, perhaps taking clarifying questions, but not using the forum for protracted discussion.

Prep Time

The beauty of the standup meeting is that everyone comes prepared to update others.  However, this preparation doesn't come for free.  You need to allow the team members time to prepare for the meeting. 

One evolution I've witnessed at Socialtext is how they increasingly shared their status updates in the wiki before the standup meeting, and then it became convention for everyone to read the updates before the meeting.  In any meeting format, status updates are better replaced with coordinating conversations, unblocking issues and gaining a shared understanding of priorities.

BAHM: Big Hairy Audacious Meetings

So far, I've provided general considerations for making meetings more productive for groups. But what are some bold things you can try with your team? For the more adventurous teams, here are some Big Hair Audacious Meeting methods to consider:

• Barcamp Your Retreat -- At Socialtext, half of our employees are remote, so our face to face meetings really matter when we have them.  Initially we did like all companies do, lots of time preparing the perfect agenda, with lots to cover.  Once we tried a Barcamp-style open space methodology for the first afternoon.  People liked it so much, we threw away the structured agenda for the week and let it self-organize.  At the end of the week, everyone revelled in the experience, but we also reviewed the original agenda and found we covered every single item.
• Turn it Off or Turn it On -- Companies have gone to the extreme in adapting to having connectivity available during meetings.  Some have banned laptops and blackberries during meetings, which I think completely misses the point.  Doing email in meetings is bad, but the cause is usually a culture of unproductive email and meetings.  Having laptops augment meetings, with wikis, backchannels and the ability to search, is good with the right focus.  But you need to make people conscious of the issue.  Try three things:
  • During specific portions of a meeting, or certain kinds of meetings, the organizer needs to demand all laptops shut for 100% focus on the people in the room.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ask people to bring their laptops and look to augment the meeting with social software and search. Afterwards, ask people how this made your team more productive, or not.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ban everything but pen, paper and people.  Afterwards, ask people how it helped or hurt productivity -- but more importantly talk about if time and effectiveness is being lost because people are not valuing attention.
• Standups -- I used standup meetings as an illustration of how time is best use for status reporting, but do try this format with your team.
• Make Every Meeting a Party -- I always quote Pete Kaminski's insight that "time spent face to face is too valuable for work" to make the point that teams need to socialize.  If you don't afford the time to help your team be unproductive, they will make meetings unproductive.
• Turn Recurring Meetings into Processes -- survey the meeting topics of your organization and you may find recurring meetings that are the result of broken business processes.  Fix the process or lackthereof.
• Get Back to One-on-Ones -- short one-to-one meetings can be incredibly productive.  They even help decrease email volume.  Consider the patterns with your team, and if you can carve out the time for one-on-one meetings by having less group meetings.
• No Meeting Monday -- this is the obvious audacious one.  Consider banning meetings on Monday, not just because it is a good day for people to collect themselves and orient how meetings should be conducted for the rest of the week.  But it will raise the conciousness of meeting cost.  As with email, knowing it is an issue we are all responsible for is half the battle.

In summary, I don't take the extreme position that meetings are wholly unproductive, and the issue isn't the cost of meetings, but how to increase their return by working together better.  In future posts I hope to address how to make meetings more effective and efficient with partners and customers.

Related readings:

• Best Buy's Results Only Work Environment (ROWE)
• Tim Ferriss' Do-Not-Do-List
• 37signals' Meetings are Toxic
• Short case study on meeting augmentation
• Outsourcing memory
• 43 folders on Topless meetings
• Productivity of Far Flung Teams
• The hidden cost of meetings

Office 2.0 Un-Conference 2.0

I'm facilitating another Barcamp-within-a-conference, for the second time at at Ishmael Ghalimi's Office 2.0 Conference.  The event is September 3rd from 9-5 and is free for registered attendees of the Office 2.0 Conference (add your name here), $50 for the general public (register).  So far, we have one session planned by David Coleman, a hands-on Collaboratory Experiment.

I'm also participating in a Office 2.0 panel on Who Should Own Communities?

BrainstormTech: Making the world better?

I'm at Fortune BrainstormTech, an event that relates technology to the bigger problems it can solve.  Tomorrow I am moderating a lunch lab on the problem of Governance, with Daniel Kaufmann, Director, Governance and Anti-Corruption, World Bank Institute.

Managing Editor Andy Serwer introduced Brainstorm to attendees as "a respite from the problems you work on and talk about bigger problems we can solve" and recommending  "Try to be cool and immerse yourself in the stew of the people and what is about to happen."

"What makes it different is trying to understand technology in the context of how it is changing," said David Kirkpatrick.  "A lot of reporters and bloggers are here, so whatever that means to you, keep it in mind."

What's Tech got to do with it?

• Marc R. Benioff
                      Founder, Chairman, and CEO
                      salesforce.com, Inc.
• Michael S. Dell
                      Chairman and CEO
                      Dell Inc.
• Gary Hamel
                      Director, Management Lab.  (has a new book)
                      Visiting Professor, London Business School
• Christiane Salm

Is tech making the world better?

Dell: of course.  Majority of the new internet users today are from developing countries, total is doubling from 1B to 2B in two years, 500k new internet users a day.  Economic growth is driven by technology, but it is just the beginning.  Is it changing politics?  Sure, I'm not the world's expert on the topic.  Sure, but that's why I asked.  The whole idea of empowerment, the theme of this conference.  One clear change is that countries used to be isolated and competitive.  When you think about staying competitive individually, company or country, the dynamics are radically changed.  Raises serious questions, particularly for developed societies, where here in the US we have a disperportion of the population vs. wealth.  The pie will get a lot bigger and we have to adjust.

Hamel: Unarguably so.  We have to think about our purposes for technology, and if they are getting better.  The net is empowering people like never before in history.  For the first time we are emancipating human imagination and it will change everything. You find creative apatheid in some places and we will put a light to it.  My interest is in the social technology of management.  We are using 100 year technology in the enterprise.  The average company 100 years ago had 4 employees and  9/10 worked for themselves, but then in 25 years all that change, because of the invention of this kind of technology called management.  We are going to see a bigger impact when technology changes the way organizations are  structured and decisions are made.  Something more dramatic in the beginning of this century and it will make a lot of managers today very uncomfortable..

Dell: We put our big ears on.  Listened.  But the mechanisms you could use to listen went massively turbocharged with the net.  We will have 2B conversations with our customers this year.  Somethign fundamentally different managerially?  The nature of the tools changes how groups are formed and managed.  A central top down organization will not be the most responsive, engaged and creative.  We are creating new businesses all the time as teams see new opportunities and it is not as centrally planned as it once was.

Benioff:  Its not just Michael talking with his customers, but his customers talking with each other and then talking with him as a collective.  Something unprecedented.  With IdeaExchange, with our product managers, they have less to do and do a better job.  We have a lot less responsiblity and can look to the customers.  Not listening to the customer, but collaborating, iterating and sharing.  The innovations on Mystarbucksidea.com.  CEOs are not superman, you can't do it all, and this technology lets you listen to the customer.  The world is faster because of technology, not sure if it is better and dont want to get into the debate, keeping up with the acceleration, the internet as the great accelerator, will make our company better because we can listen.

Salm: I wonder if from a mangement perspective it becomes hard to manage the complexity.  We have more data and it may be hard to decide and keep sight within speed.  Managing companies with changes in organizational structures with network and heirarchies.  500 years ago Gutenberg was born in my town in Germany, allowed a new religion.  Disruptions across industries, media having real real challenges, I think it will change our society more than it will change our businesses.  Busnesses have to adapt, but societies do change and their change will have a bigger impact.

Is there is more willingness in Web 2.0 stuff to think in bigger terms?

Benioff: Clinton said a change in the world requires a change in conciousness.  Even in our own myopic world, Scott from Intuit called it the fall of Rome.  There is a big shift, with the internet.  (he said web 3.0 so I stopped typing)  We are going to get to a point where we see a radical step in terms of what this industry will deliver in the next 10 years.

Hamil in the late 18th cent

Hamil: structural reform needs to happen for the world to take advantage of this technology.  we used to be isolated, now you can bring capital and talent from anywhere in the world.  If you aren't part of that world you are still on the outside looking in.  Where terrorism emerged.  A lot more has to happen.  I am optimistic, but don't want ot be pollyannish about how technology will even out disparities without other changes.

Salm: Germans are known for things, like mp3, but the business was made somewhere else.  Competitive and entrepreneurial environment is not what we are good at, makes me sad, but our culture is not to take risk.  Germany as a market always works because it is the largest.  But I don't worry too much about it, we will be good enough to compete, and within Europe it is different. Scandinavia and UK pick up technology quickly.  My worries for Europe are not about inventiveness, but rather demographics.  Europe is growing substantially older than the US.  What does that mean for the other trends?

Hamel: Sometimes we over estimate cultural differences, what most limits innovation is how we are managed.  In the creative economy, it is working against us.  Towers Perin survey of 80k people across the world about about how emotional and intellectually engaged they are at work, no more than 20% engaged.  The scandal of management is that we habve feudal systems that are better at harnassing the customer's imagine than their employees.  Whereever you look at technology it is not friendly to heriarchy.

Vint Cerf: The internet has show it is possible to do these things, so we can't go back, but we need to make it work.  I agree with Mark about platforms for innovation, but innovation at scale is something that is new.

Benioff:  What's new is the internet as a platform at scale. What it indicates to me is that if we are moving from transaction to collaboration to innovation -- this country needs innovation today.

Hamel: If you polled the top guys in the F500 50 years ago about if they could create the internet, the couldn't.  It is imporant to have a competence to define you, but today it is more interesting to find your platfom advantage.

Esther Dyson: the word I heard missing was risk, a bigger difference than mangement when it comes to innovation.  Now startups need little money to take the risk.

Dell: An advancement of technology can accelerate a disruption that is already happening, in the job market for example.

Benioff: With an increased focus and emphasis on risk, we in the industry have a call for transparency, at the vendor or user level. Its like SarBox for the network.  Otherwise you lose trust.  Trust only comes from a level of transparency in the system.

The industry has reached a point where the society is so reliant on its products, that perhaps the industry needs to take its responsibility seriously?

Brian Dear: Cover story on Fortune about Tesla.  Where is the platform in the auto industry?  To let 100 Tesla's

Dell: The roads are already there.

Will this change the kind of leadership in businesses? More political philosophers?

Dell: This is the information age and what we need are people that are good at connecting.  You

Hamel: if you look on the web you find heirarchies, but they are natural, meritocritous.  Same thing will happen in organizations.  The single reason companies get in trouble is management's mental models depreciate faster than their power.  The architecht of the internal collaboration platfom will rise.

Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, on How does an established company transform how it innovates? 

Now the most profound change management challenge, to where end users create the value themselves and see others to do so together.  It is challenging all of our beliefs: management, customer experience.  And as a new CEO where I walk in thinking we are a good baseball team and found myself on a football field.  How do we harness this and create value.  Like Dell said about putting on big ears.  We ask ourselves three questions:

1. Are we paying our employees to do work that our customers would volunteer to do and can do it better than us?  Turbotax Live Community, 40% of the customer questions answered by customers, with better answers and it cost us next to nothing
2. Are we sitting on a gold mine of data?  Who people want to talk turns out to be other small business owners. We have to figure out to connect those people and now we are 50% SaaS and if we can get people to liberate QuickBooks databases it benefits everyone.
3. Will our 25 years of success be an accelerant or an inhibiter?  The answer, we are discobvering is with our youth.  Generation Y is telling us what to do differently. 

Innovation is a moving target and it doesn't come with instructions. We are learning from you, used to be called plagarism, now we call it benchmarking.

RecentChangesCamp in Palo Alto this Weekend

I'm in London this weekend on business, so its a shame to miss RecentChangesCamp in Palo Alto.  Hosted by Socialtext, the event is more than a Barcamp for wikis.  It draws people from afar with in interest in wiki spirit. 

If you are in town, definitely stop by.

London Social Software Dinner

I'm in London next Thursday and co-hosting a social software dinner with the good folks at Headshift.  If you can join us, here's the details:

• Pre-dinner drink and gathering at All Bar One, Shad Thames waterfront, from 18:30.
• Followed by dinner at Cantina, also Shad Thames waterfront, at 20:00.
• Map
• Nearest tube stops: London Bridge, Tower Hill, Bermondsey
• RSVP the old fashioned way by calling Lars at 020 7357 7358

Hope to see you there!

RecentChangesCamp May 9-11th in Palo Alto

RecentChangesCamp, the Barcamp for the wiki way, is May 9-11th in Palo Alto:

RecentChangesCamp was born from the intersection of wiki and OpenSpace - a very wiki-like way of organizing gatherings. A lot of cool people into wiki, community and collaboration will be there - what do you want to talk with them about? Every participant is invited to lead their own sessions; the guideline is to take responsibility for what you love. In addition to general and technical conversations about - and actual coding on - wikis and other software, session topics from past RCCs have covered subjects from art to social organizing to philanthropy, playing a creative conversation game, and individual & group coding practices. See the past conference wikis for more complete lists and session notes.

Anyone and everyone is invited to attend. You will especially enjoy Recent Changes Camp, if you happen to be any of the the following:

    *      Member of any open wiki community or someone who uses wikis at work, school or in any other context
    * Interested in community, action, collaboration, creativity or any other activity in which the self-organizing power of wiki might be helpful
    *      Interested in the OpenCulture and/or OpenTechnology movements
    *      Interested in knowledge creation and sharing knowledge
    *      A generally curious and inquisitive person

Signup on the wiki, Upcoming or Facebook.

SHDH 24.5

Next Saturday at 3pm till bust is SuperHappyDevHouse 24.5 at the Socialtext Coworking space.

StartupHappyDevHouse is not a full on DevHouse, so we'll be providing snacks and drinks, but no dinner. We'll also be skipping the Lightning Talks, which leaves 100% of the time for hacking! Bring your laptop, your project, your startup and leave your shoes at the door (or not). As usual, admission is free and open to everyone.

RSVP @ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=10749954249

RSVP @ Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/472612

Business Applications for Social Networking, Live and Streamed

Tomorrow I'm honored to keynote the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Executives' Business Applications for Social Networking half-day event at the Computer History Museum.

Social Networking can be a powerful ally to professionals and businesses. This conference will highlight the value of Social Networking in fostering meaningful business relationships that benefit individuals both personally and professionally. It will provide examples of specific applications where Social Networking can be used to communicate with personal networks AND to accelerate company visibility. After all, who isn’t interested in hearing about strategies that can maximize their growth and the growth of their business.

If you can't attend in person, it will be on Ustream beginning at 8:45am.

My presentation:

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Scaling Customer Service Video

Below is a video of a panel I was on with Heather Champ from Flickr, Frederick Mendler from Rackspace, Pratap Penumalli from Google, and moderated by Marc Hedlund of Wesabe at Customer Service is the New Marketing.

After the event, Socialtext signed on to the Company Customer Pact.