See www.buildbigideas.com/post/effective-meetings for full show notes.
Four Imperatives for Effective Meetings:
1. Preparation
2. Leader
3. Agenda
4. End with an Action Plan: Champion and Deadline for each item
Five Meeting Tips:
1. Keep meetings small. Seven people or less is best.
2. Ban devices
3. Keep it short. 30 minutes or less is best
4. Make sure everyone participates
5. Don't hold a meeting just to update a team
See www.buildbigideas.com for full show notes.
References
Maker’s Schedule Manager’s Schedule, by Paul Graham
A single one-hour-long meeting can prevent a maker from doing their best work for a full day.
Clustering meetings into "office-hours" blocks can minimize the interruptions to a maker's schedule.
Amazon Three Rules for Having an Efficient Meeting
1.) Two pizza team. “We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas.”
2.) No Powerpoint. Write a six page narrative memo before calling a meeting.
3.) Start with silence. “Just like highschool kids, executives will bluff their way through the meeting, as if they’ve read the memo because we’re busy. And so, you’ve got to actually carve the time for the memo to get read – and that’s what the first half hour of the meeting is for.”
Warren Buffett Q&A at 1999 Berkshire-Hathaway Annual Meeting, Afternoon Session (10 minutes before end of session):
How does Berkshire Hathaway add value to the companies it buys?
Warren Buffett:
“The biggest thing we bring to the party on a generalized basis is … we enable terrific managers to spend a greater amount of their time and energies on what they do best... We don’t want to run around and attend a lot of meetings and do all of these things that people do."
"You have to see it to believe it, but in a great many corporate operations, the importance of a large group of people is tied to how much they meddle in the affairs of other people that are out there doing the work. And we stay out of the way. ... Not only do people have more time to work on the productive things, but I also think they appreciate the fact that we leave them alone."