How Chat and Youth Are Killing the Meeting 205
dominique_cimafranca writes "Forbes columnist Dan Woods describes a change in the way some companies handle meetings. Owing to instant messaging and younger tech-savvy CEOs, meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week. Woods proposes ways to make this 'meetingless' management effective."
I don't know (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been sitting in an IRC channel with all the devs all day every day. Sounds like an all-day meeting to me, it's just more efficient.
This is a *good thing* (Score:4, Interesting)
I work for a very successful, young company which is run by a very young CEO. On average, I have no meetings at all. We're currently in a huge crunch right now, which means I have 3-minute check-ins at the beginning and the end of the day.
Long meetings have been the butt of jokes for as long as I can remember, and for good reason: they're a giant waste of time, especially for technical people.
This looks very much like one of those articles people will be mocking in 10 years. This really makes Forbes look like they're clinging to the 20th century...how embarrassing.
Re:Bravo, Bravissimo (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the thing I like about Agile development (and its got some huge flaws no doubt) is the 15 minute daily meeting. It replaces status reports which take too long, are rarely accurate and are often not read by bosses or coworkers and replaces them with a fast, efficient meeting (if done correctly) where everyone gets a quick update on what other people are up too. It helps you to see your part in the overall project, helps to spot issue before they come up and give you some face time with the team and your boss.
No kidding... (Score:5, Interesting)
He needed to be in constant contact with me throughout the entire day.
I had gone down to the server room for about 45 minutes, and came back to this IM:
"ANSWER ME!!!! YOU MUST ANSWER ME! I AM YOUR MANAGER AND NEED TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!" I'm not kidding. It was that obnoxious.
Never mind the fact that we all carried around cellphones and he could have easily called me if he so desperately needed to talk to me.
It turned out that, as usual, all he wanted was a "status update" on an install I was doing. Honestly, this was more of a quite common tech-to-management role switch problem, but the fact that he had IM at his disposal just made workdays damn near unbearable.
IM kills meetings too (Score:3, Interesting)
By the headline I thought this might be about people using IM during meetings killing things. I tend to agree that having multi-hour meetings usually is pretty useless. If you really have that much information that needs to be shared chances are no one in your audience can absorb it all in a long tedious non-interactive meeting.
OTOH, I hope people don't try to take this as "we can do everything without face to face interaction!" This is also problematic. I work with a number of people who live far away and only come into the office every few weeks. We work pretty well over the interwebs but the couple days we get for face to face interaction is invaluable.
Back to my first thought, when you do have to be in a meeting and bring a laptop, just don't bury yourself in IMing with other people, checking e-mail, etc. It's distracting and I really hate it when someone has to repeat a question because someone was reading the latest Slashdot headlines. It's a level of inconsiderateness that shouldn't be found in a professional environment. That said, if I called a meeting and it seems useless to you, tell me!
Re:The real problem ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is my dick really that small? Shoot. No wonder my wife lives on the other side of the country.
Re:Actually misguided (Score:4, Interesting)
Not misguided, but under-informed. Let me just expand on what you've implied.
People think they can multitask. Young people who grow up with it especially are certain they can do it with little or no penalty. But they can't, as recent studies have shown.
The studies Tom DeMarco talks about in his programming management books (/Peopleware/ jumps to mind) which show that programming speed (and especially style) goes down with interruption and noise.
The assumption that the IM time is free and productive is a fallacy. Instead of paying for an annoying meeting for an hour a day, management is now paying for a low-level intrusion ALL DAY LONG. So while this may be an improvement, it needs to be quantified. (It may actually be a net loss of productivity.)
It is probably (though not certainly -- we need numbers and studies) more profitable to make meetings short and effective.
Re:Bravo, Bravissimo (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen meetings go on for a solid day because no manager in the place would man up and take charge ore responsibility. everything kept going around and around, it's what jaded me against MBA's and how worthless they are.
I have wasted 8 hours in a meeting over a data protocol that I finally gave up and said," I'll write the damned spec, Hell I came up with a working prototype over the last 4 hours and it's already installed on the test server. Want to take a look?"
I was afterward talked to about stepping out of my bounds and embarrassing a couple of managers. I shrugged, and said, "if they would do their jobs, I would not have to do it for them"
I am so glad I don't work at a large corporation anymore...
P.S.: they used my spec, After a manager tweaked it by flipping two data fields and claiming it as his own.