Steve Jobs Believed That Meetings Were a Huge Problem. Larry Page Found That Addressing It Was Incredibly Challenging

Excessive meetings at work have long been a barrier to productivity. This issue has become a hot topic in recent discussions, but as early as 1986, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs identified it as one of the biggest enemies of efficiency in tech companies.

Years later, when Google founder Larry Page took over as CEO from Eric Schmidt, he encountered the same problem. He recognized the challenge of addressing it without potentially creating even bigger issues.

Both Jobs’ and Page’s efforts to shift the culture surrounding meetings revealed that while the solutions may seem straightforward, implementing them is often more complicated than it seems.

Steve Jobs and the Issue of Meetings

In 1986, Jobs recognized that frequent and unproductive meetings were negatively impacting the creativity and efficiency of his teams. He expressed this concern in letters compiled in the posthumous book Make Something Wonderful.

Jobs observed that many meetings at NeXT were becoming a waste of time that slowed innovation and hindered rapid decision-making, instead of facilitating progress. He advocated for minimizing meetings, even going so far as to ban them on Thursdays, and arrange them only when absolutely necessary.

According to Jobs, the key was to keep teams small and focused, avoiding large gatherings where most attendees contributed little of value. This approach later helped Apple maintain its agility and responsiveness, and it also inspired the CEO of another tech giant: Google.

Larry Page and the Challenge of Changing Google

In 2011, Page took over as CEO of Google. At that time, the company had already grown to 30,000 employees and was facing increasingly ambitious challenges.

Former Google employee Jacob Voytko experienced those changes firsthand. According to him, Page recognized that too many meetings were hindering the company’s ability to innovate quickly.

Voytko shared an anecdote where Page criticized large companies like Yahoo! for taking weeks to update their homepage, while Google could do it in mere hours. However, when Google started to expand significantly, Page began to wonder if someone at an unknown startup might be joking about Google’s slow decision-making.

To address this issue, Page introduced new rules for meetings:

• Every meeting must have a decision maker.
• Topics can be discussed, but once a decision is made, everyone is expected to execute it as though it were their own.
• Each meeting should have a clear purpose, structure, and agenda. If you have nothing to contribute, please don’t attend.
• Everyone should be on time and fully attentive during the meeting (no multitasking).
• Limit meetings to groups of fewer than 10 people and ensure that notes are shared widely afterward.
• Set a maximum duration of 50 minutes for meetings, instead of an hour, and adhere to this time limit.

Challenges of Implementing the New Rules

Despite Page’s instructions being clear, Voytko pointed out that putting these measures into practice was challenging. Many employees continued to prolong meetings to the point where it became impossible to continue because others needed the room.

Some teams attempted to take advantage of the 10-minute gaps between meetings by holding quick discussions while standing. This caused frustration among those who often extended their meetings beyond the 50-minute limit.

According to Business Insider, Page established a guideline that no decision should wait for a meeting. If a meeting was necessary, it had to be called immediately. This led to some confusion and organizational chaos. The guideline was interpreted to mean that these urgent meetings took priority over others. In the end, changing long-established habits requires more than just implementing simple rules.

To support these changes, Page divided Google into seven major product groups, each led by a clear leader. The aim was for each group to operate like an internal startup, streamlining decision-making processes and preventing bureaucracy from hindering project progress.

More than a decade later, big tech companies are trying to adopt similar strategies to avoid being outpaced by the swift decision-making typical of startups.

Images | Rodeo Project Management Software | Apple| Niall Kennedy

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