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Steve Jobs in 2010.
13 tricks Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, andother famous execs have used to runeffective meetingsDRAKE BAER STRATEGY OCT. 14, 2015, 4:08 AM
Americans sit through some 11million meetings every day—with the unproductive onescosting companies anestimated $37 billion a year.
We know that meetings tend tofall apart thanks to sloppyagendas and unclear groundrules, but what makes themsuccessful?
We researched how some ofthe most effective executives inhistory — from the late Applefounder Steve Jobs to Amazonchief Jeff Bezos and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — run the meetings thatinvariably fill their calendars.
Here’s what we found.
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonalinvestment company Bezos Expeditions.
Legendary GM CEO Alfred Sloan said little — and then madefollowups.
Sloan ran GM from the 1920sto the ’50s. During that timeheled GM to become the world’slargest corporation — in the’50s, GM held 46% of the USauto market and employedover 600,000 Americans.
Sloan is also creditedwith inventing moderncorporate structure.
According to leadership guruPeter Drucker, the followup memo was one of Sloan’s goto tools.
After any formal meeting — in which he simply announced the purpose, listened towhat people had to say, and then left — Sloan would send a followup memo with aplan of action.
Drucker’s take:
[Sloan] immediately wrote a short memo addressed to one attendee of themeeting. In that note, he summarized the discussion and its conclusions andspelled out any work assignment decided upon in the meeting (including adecision to hold another meeting on the subject or to study an issue). Hespecified the deadline and the executive who was to be accountable for theassignment. He sent a copy of the memo to everyone who’d been present at themeeting.
These memos made Sloan an “outstandingly effective executive,” Drucker arguesand you might say they were a key to GM’s dominance of the 20th century.
Andreessen Horowitz cofounder and former Opsware CEO BenHorowitz likes to have onetoone meetings.
Back when he was a CEO,Horowitz led Opswareto a $1.6billion sale to HP in 2007.
Two years later, hecofounded AndreessenHorowitz, probably the mostsoughtafter firm in venturecapital.
Horowitz, who spends much ofhis time mentoring youngleaders, says the mostimportant job for a CEO is to architect the way people communicate in a company.
The onetoone meeting is essential to that process, he says, as it’s the best placefor ideas and critiques to flow up from employees to management.
Here’s his take on how to run one:
If you like structured agendas, then the employee should set the agenda. Agood practice is to have the employee send you the agenda in advance.
This will give her a chance to cancel the meeting if nothing is pressing. It alsomakes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as sheneeds.
During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, the manager should do 10%of the talking and 90% of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most oneonones.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk demands that people besuper prepared.
Musk has incredibly high
standards, so if you’re meetingwith him at Tesla or SpaceX,you have to be ready.
As one anonymous Muskemployee shares on Quora:
When we met with Elon, wewere prepared. Because ifyou weren’t, he’d let youknow it. If he asked areasonable followupquestion and you weren’tprepared with an answer, well, good luck.
What else would you expect from the most badass CEO in America?
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg sticks to a strict agenda.
Sandberg brings a spiralboundnotebook with her to everymeeting. In that notebook is alist of discussion points andaction items.
“She crosses them off one byone, and once every item on apage is checked, she rips thepage off and moves to thenext,”Fortune reports. “If everyitem is done 10 minutes into anhourlong meeting, the meeting is over.”
The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs kept meetings as small as
possible.
Jobs led Apple to become oneof the world’s most valuablecompanies, creating consumerfriendly products with sleekdesigns.
He ran meetings with a similarminimalism. He hated whenthey were too big, because toomany minds in a room got inthe way of simplicity.
In one tale, Jobs was in aweekly meeting with Apple’s ad agency and spied someone who didn’t regularlyattend. He asked who she was, listened to her reply, and politely told her to getout: “I don’t think we need you in this meeting,” he said. “Thanks.”
Jobs carried the same standard with himself: When US President Barack Obamaasked him to a meeting of tech darlings, he declined. The guest list was too long.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer aggressively vets every idea.
As we’ve reportedbefore, Mayer gets to the bottom of any proposal brought herway.
Product managers or designers sitting down with the exec have their ideasthoroughly vetted through a series of questions, like:
How was that researched?
What was the research methodology?
How did you back that up?
This vetting process is just oneof the many strategies Mayerused to shake up Yahoo.
Alphabet CEO LarryPage says no oneshould wait for ameeting to make adecision.
In August, Page announced aplan to radically restructureGoogle by forming a newparent company calledAlphabet, which he would lead.Google officially becameAlphabet in early October.
Some years prior, in 2011,Page sent out a companywideemail with the subjectline: how to run meetingseffectively. One of his tips wasto designate a decisionmakerfor every meeting. But evenmore importantly, Page made the point that you might not need a meeting at all.
“No decision should ever wait for a meeting,” the email reads. “If a meetingabsolutely has to happen before a decision should be made, then the meetingshould be scheduled immediately.”
Nike CEO Mark Parker doodles through his meetings.
Parker doesn’t just manageNike’s $30 billionayearathletic empire, he brings hisown designs. Parker walks intomeetings with a Moleskinenotebook under his arm — fullof his sketches of newproducts.
In 2009, cyclist LanceArmstrong was in a businessmeeting with Parker, whospent the whole time doodlingin his notebook. At the end of the meeting, Armstrong asked to seewhat he drew.
“He turns the pad over and shows me this perfect shoe,” Armstrong recalls.
The doodles help clarify the brainstorming process, Parker says, one that’s aconstant balance between what design wants and what business needs.
“I think about balance a lot,” Parker says. “Most of us are out of balance, and that’sOK, but you need to keep your eye on the overall equilibrium to be successful.”
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman meets with people individuallyevery week.
Stoppelman has a oneonone meeting with each of his direct reports every week.
“Sometimes I feel like the company’s psychiatrist,” he shared on a Reddit AMA,“but I do feel like listening to people and hearing about their problems (personaland professional) cleans out the cobwebs and keeps the organization humming.”
Evernote founder Phil Libin always brings a highpotentialemployee to participate.
At any given meeting atEvernote, there will besomeone there who doesn’tbelong.
This is by design. The cloudnotetaking startup has aninternal program called “officertraining,” in which employeesget assigned to meetings thataren’t in their specialty area toexplore other parts of thecompany.
“They’re there to absorb whatwe’re talking about,” Libin,Evernote’s executive chairmanand former CEO, told the NewYork Times. “They’re not justspectators. They ask questions;they talk.”
Libin got the idea from talkingwith a friend who served on anuclear submarine. To be anofficer of such a sub, you had to know how to do everybody else’s job.
“Those skills are repeatedly trained and taught,” he said. “And I rememberthinking, ‘That’s really cool.’”
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to get people arguing.
If you work at Amazon, you’d better be comfortable with conflict. Bezos hates“social cohesion,” that tendency people have for finding consensus for no other
reason than it feels good.
That distaste for agreeability isreinforcedby Amazon’s leadershipprinciples, one of which reads:
Leaders are obligated torespectfully challengedecisions when theydisagree, even when doingso is uncomfortable orexhausting. Leaders haveconviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of socialcohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
He’s also not a fan of PowerPoint presentations. Instead, he asks his employees towrite a four to sixpage memo about their proposals and use meetings to fieldquestions.
Oprah Winfrey schedules as few meetings as possible, preferringemails instead.
Winfrey is one of the wealthiestand most powerful women inthe world. She’s also one of thebusiest.
Between running the OprahWinfrey Network, publishingthe Oprah Winfrey Magazine,and producing new TV series,she does not have time to wastein meetings.
“[I] really, really, really try toavoid meetings,” Winfrey told J.J. McCorvey in an interview for Fast Company.She prefers that her staff instead send her detailed emails.
She once spent 20 minutes on the phone convincing Coretta Scott King not to setup an inperson meeting with her.Winfrey told her: “Whatever it is, I’m going to bemore inclined to do it if you just ask me on the phone. Because if you come all theway here, if I don’t want to do it, I’m still not gonna do it. And then you would havewasted your time, and I’m going to feel bad, and you’re going to feel bad.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has weekly fourhour meetings withhis leadership team.
In a recent interview with TheWall Street Journal, Nadellasaid he convenes with his topexecs one Friday a month for awhopping eight hours. Theother three weeks, they meetfor four hours.
“The senior leadership team ofany company [has] got to stayon the same page,” he told TheJournal. “Any organization caneasily devolve into a bunch of silos.”
What are they doing for all that time? A Bloomberg Business story notedthat Nadella keeps a dashboard that measures the performance of all hisexecutives. It includes “realtime graphs and data on financial performance toproduct usage,” and “executives bring out the dashboards each Friday at seniorleadership meetings to help coordinate efforts across business units.”