Smash Company
Description: Where Ideas Are Distilled Into Something Useful
(Yet another post from my old amazon internal blog.)
Imagine a sports coach choosing drills for an upcoming practice. One drill has the team split up into pairs, and each pair practices a certain move, switching roles each try. In another drill, the team lines up and each member practices a move alone while the others watch and wait their turn. Which drill is a better use of limited practice time?
As meetings grow, they tend toward the latter drill; at any given time, most of the participants aren’t engaged. Whatever is being discussed simply isn’t relevant or even vaguely interesting to them. I propose a general metric for meeting quality: engaged-person-minutes divided by total-person-minutes. To the extent that this ratio is near one the meeting is making effective use of its participant’s time.
Smash Company