No one likes meetings and for good reason. In most meetings, most of the time, most people think most of what goes on is a waste of time.
So what if you took out all of the stupid, wasteful stuff and left only the useful parts?
Enter the 22 minute meeting. This is an idea from Nicole Steinbok, and she presented the idea at Seattle Ignite 9.� When I saw her present this concept at Microsoft a few months ago, she gave one of the best short talks I’ve ever seen.
Here’s the poster from her talk: 
I couldn’t find a write up of the core points, so here’s my take on her ideas from what I remember from her talk. All credit should go her way:
What do you think?
If you like the idea, help it spread. Nicole started a facebook group and a poster you can download (PDF).� Pass it on.
When/If they post her ignite talk online, I’ll post it here.
Found this nice observation on work culture, that could fit in the ever growing asshole driven development list:
HiPPO – Highest Paid Person’s Opinion Wins:
“HiPPO’s rule the world when it comes to creating customer experiences. And that’s a bad thing. No matter what you think the optimal customer experience should be on the website it is quite likely that you walk into a meeting room, or office, and regardless of your competence the HiPPO decides what goes on the site.”
This is part of a longer post on how to overcome this for marketers, called Experiment or Go Home.
It’s a common thing among high level managers to poke at visual design issues – it’s an easy way to give the pretense they’re involved, or to remind people they still have power, without doing much work.
One of the best exercises a working person can do is this: spend some time doing the jobs of the people you work with. Every manager should be required to do this once a year, even if just for a few hours. Most of us, most of the time, work with blinders on. We naturally assume our work is harder and more important than the people we depend on, or who depend on us, and the only way to be reminded of this is to put yourself in their shoes now and then.
At the UI14 conference last year I caught an excellent talk by Leah Buley, an experience designer at Adaptive Path, called UX Team of One. The core idea is in many, but not all cases, one person can effectively do both analysis (usability engineering) and synthesis (design and prototyping of new ideas) if they have the right attitude, experience and perspective, which she described in detail in her talk (slides here).
This is not to suggest singular expertise in usability or interaction design is useless. Not at all. My point is in many cases the usability and design problems are relatively simple and the reason why things are bad is not a lack of expertise, but a lack of willingness among ‘experts’ to step out of their safe expert box and fight to effect change, or a failure to succeed at it. Someone with fewer pedigrees tends to see fewer boundaries, and that’s often what a team or culture or company needs for change to happen. Many projects need basic first aid, not brain surgery, and I suspect medics, who are generalists, do better first-aid than neurosurgeons, who are specialists. Of course if I have a brain tumor, I’ll wait for Mr. Neurosurgery, but otherwise he’s not my best bet.
There are many people with PhDs in cognitive psychology, or Masters degrees in design, working on projects with abysmal usability or interaction design. The problem isn’t lack of expertise, it’s a lack of awareness for how to convert that expertise into action. Their deep expertise can be a liability if it gets in the way of getting their hands dirty.
The intellectual exercise of trying to do a project alone, where you have to play the role of product planner, project manager, designer, engineer, tester, marketer (or whatever the list of roles is in your world), even if just for a day, forces you to rethink the assumptions about each and every contribution on a project. Maybe it’s harder than you think, or maybe it’s easier, who knows? You likely have no idea since you’ve never done any of those things. If you have clients, what do you really know about their world? Project and Middle Managers are notorious for having no real sense for how all the contributions by others that they get credit for, are actually done. This is an easy disease to cure: invest some time standing in other people’s shoes.
I believe there is a core set of skills, orthogonal to traditional ideas of expertise, that defines who is effective at work or not. Call it savvy, self-awareness, organizational agility, or just plain common sense, but it’s the real factor at play at why some experts have an impact and others don’t. Playing Team of One for a day is one easy way to start getting at those skills. It gives you a language and sensibility for thinking about the people you depend on, the absence of which contributes to why they’re ignoring or frustrating you.
Related Posts:
As a follow up to my post on Microsoft and Creative Destruction, it’s worth looking at this chart, from Silicon Alley Insider.
It shows the quarterly operating expenses for Microsoft’s Online division. This last quarter, Microsoft lost $466 million. That’s 3 months.
Over the last year (4 quarters) Microsoft has lost nearly $2 billion.
And from what I remember, you’d see losses for the period before what’s shown on the chart, as the division has always struggled with profitability.

It’s an unbelievable chart. I’ve had to stop writing several times just to look at it again.
I’m certainly not arrogant enough to claim I know how to fix an entire division. But I can look at this and ask some basic questions:
If past history is any judge, Steve Sinofsky, the former VP from Office who took charge of Windows for Windows 7, might be the only weapon Microsoft can use to tackle Online. Many other VPs have been at the helm, including David Cole who was my VP for a time in the IE days, but as the chart shows, they’ve been largely ineffective at things other than spending lots of money.
In spirit of my last post, the better question is what did Sinofsky do to the Windows team to turn Vista into Windows 7? Why isn’t there a case study on this, that’s stapled onto the forehead of every manager until it’s read? And how can that be emulated in the Online division? My suspicion is this case study has not been done, and if it has, it’s either not being shared widely or it’s being ignored.
In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.
This week’s reader’s choice post: What’s the impact of 60 hour work weeks and only 2 weeks of vacation on American companies? (submitted by Lynn – thx!)
The running joke at any big corporation is the phrase ‘work/life balance‘. Anywhere that needs to make a special phrase like this is by definition a place populated by workaholics. You’d never hear people talk about ‘work/breathing’ balance, or ‘work/clothing’ balance, because work never puts a supply of oxygen or a shirt on your back in question, unless you’re a workaholic naked astronaut or something.
It’s interesting how us Americans are fond of taking pride in our freedoms, yet when it comes to time off we are the least free for much of the Western world. It’s typical in Europe to get 6-8 weeks off 4-6 weeks off, commonly taken in the summer. This explains, in part, why Europeans have a deeper sense of their own culture, as they actually have time to learn, experience and enjoy the parts of life not spent in front of keyboards or in meetings.
Frankly, hours are a lousy way to measure value. If I can do great work in 5 hours, work my peers at best do in 10, that’s not my problem. I should be rewarded for results, not how much time it took me to get them. A good manager knows this. Good companies know this too. My best managers made clear they didn’t care about the HR policies for time off, or hourly reporting. They knew I’d be motivated to work hardest for them if after I got my stuff done, and had done it very well, I was free to do as I wished. (Oddly, in cultures like this, I tended to stay late and kept working because I enjoyed my work so much).
The impact of the 60 hour work week, or any rigidly defined number of hours, is that smart people loaf around. Rather than be efficient, clever, and wise, and go home, people feel obligated, are in some cases are rewarded, to linger, to pretend, and to give pretense about how long it takes to actually do things. This is all kinds of bad. We should reward people who kick significant ass and then go home. Early. Not those who pull all-nighters for things that were never that complex to begin with. All sorts of goodness happens when managers learn to reward results, not effort. And this starts but getting past the stupid pretense of effort known as hours.
Miserly vacation limits are juvenile and short term thinking. It assumes that time off is bad for the company, and puts faith in the notion that doing things outside of work is an indulgence. God bless the Puritans, as we are still victimized by the prudish stink of their ideals. We want to be whole people, and being whole means having an identity beyond work. We are more than our jobs. Two weeks of vacation takes a bet employees won’t be around that long, so why invest in their long term happiness? If they burn out, it’s not our problem. That’s what two weeks of vacation says to me.
A major reason I quit my job in 2003 was to have complete control over my TIME. The only measure of life you can not get more of. I did not want some corporate policy, written by someone I’d never meet, defining how most of my waking hours on planet earth would be spent. The older I got the more clear it became I’d rather make less money and take on more risk than willingly give away control over MOST OF MY LIFETIME. Especially if the thing I was spending all that time making was mediocre, forgettable and far from what I’d call reaching for my best possible work. But enough about me.
Certainly for any creative field, which many knowledge worker type companies claim they are, time away from work is where much creative growth happens. It’s away from work people have new experiences, see new places, ask new questions, and learn to appreciate the life they’re working so hard to get.When people return from vacation they are better people, not worse (explaining the wise philosophy of rock star web firm, Jackson Fish). And they bring new energy, perspective and ideas back into the company, all things that are essentially priceless.
The objections to more time off typically are:
My bet is, in a well run company with a good manager, if you:
You can pull this off without any noticeable decrease in performance. I’d even bet you might see some increases in work quality, as people have real motivation, are free from the pretense of pretending to be busy, and will love their lives so much more and bring some of that love to work with them every day. Why not try this as an experiment for a year?
Other variables worth trying:
It’s surprising, but few companies I’ve heard of have ever experimented with different approaches to vacation and unpaid leave. If you know of examples and case studies, please leave a link.
So what do you think? I’m a insane? Has being independent warped my demented brain? Or is there plenty of room for more time off without betraying the bottom line?
Related: See my essay, work vs progress.
Royal Winchester is a very smart guy. He also has a disturbing habit of thinking very well about things. He recently offered me this theory on interviews.
The theory goes as follows: Interviewing is mostly bullshit.
As the theory goes, most of us make instinctive judgments on factors we don’t understand in the first five minutes, and spend the rest of the time, and the time discussing with other interviewers, back-filling logical reasons to support an intuitive response we’re largely in denial of.
Not everyone does this of course, and not all the time, but the theory suggests it’s true much of the time, or is a significant factor in interviews.
There are some contributing hypotheses to the theory:
Despite my affinity for this theory, I believe groups that take interviewing seriously, and leaders who reward interviewers for putting more time and careful thought into interviews, end up with better teams. The choice to hire someone is the most important decision you make that month, or year and the wise know this. At a start-up it can make or break the company. And the more seriously people take the process, even if it’s flawed, the higher the odds they’ll recognize the natural shortcomings above and invest in minimizing them.
While I don’t think all interviews are a crapshoot, I agree with the Winchester theory – in most interviews, most of the time, it’s mostly bullshit as a tool in truly evaluating how well a person would perform in the job, even if the people doing the interviews don’t intend it to be.
The real story is in who you recruit to interview in the first place. Better candidates in, better candidates out: see my essay how to interview and hire people.
What is your take on interviewing? How do you work against the Winchester theory?