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What Is The Most Important Question That Will Make Your Meetings Productive
Wisdom From Great Leaders. Part 2.
Many articles have been written about Jeff Bezos’ famous “Two Pizza Rule” for productive meetings. When there are too many people at the meeting, the meeting will become less productive. Jeff’s remedy is never to have a meeting where two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group. The concept makes sense, but how many people are too many?
Andy Grove’s (former Chairman and CEO of Intel) guidance is no more than eight. In his book “High Output Management,” he devoted a whole chapter to how to make meetings productive. Rather than looking at meetings as a waste of time, he suggested we use the time spent in them as efficiently as possible. Even though his book was written back in 1983, a lot of it is still relevant today. In this edited extract from his book, I have put together a list of suggestions from Andy on how to make meetings productive. I hope you will find it useful too.
In his view, there are two basic kinds of meetings: process-oriented meetings and mission-oriented meetings. With process-oriented meetings, knowledge is shared, and information is exchanged. Essentially, it is a discussion that takes place on a recurring basis. There are three types of process-oriented meetings: one-on-one, staff meeting…
