don’t you like it meetings work? You’re not alone. Steve Jobs despised them. He was known to cancel meetings if he didn’t see a clear purpose in them. I preferred telecommuting short meetings, lasting about 10 minutes and focused on specific objectives. And it was like that for a simple reason: he hated this tendency to talk and talk without coming to a clear conclusion. A “damn distraction for engineers”, as he has come to point out on more than one occasion.
This maxim will be explicit throughout his career: concerned about the productivity and efficiency of the company, he will go so far as to say that having fewer people working in the company was a clear advantage to maintain quality rather than quantity. However, Apple has never stopped extending its arms, producing and selling more iPhones and introducing more products every year, both in its range of hardware and services (iCloud, Apple TV+, Apple Music Classical… ).
Meetings kill creativity
Day of meetings, day wasted. It is a message that has permeated and which, unfortunately, is backed up by real numbers: the meetings, on too many occasions, they are unproductive. We can therefore understand that Steve Jobs’ contempt for them was not a pose, but a real act of combat.
In Walter Isaacson’s biographical novel ‘Steve Jobs’, on page 434, an interview with BusinessWeek from 1997 is glossed where Jobs elaborates on his thoughts on business meetings:
“Meetings are one of the worst things in business today. They’re terrible. Meetings interrupt work, break momentum, kill creativity. And that’s hours and hours of wasted time.”
Thursday, day without work meetings
That “they kill creativity” is critical in a business where creative flow is key to staying ahead of your rivals. In order to avoid this situation, he designed a model. Here is the letter he sent internally:
Our company is founded on the principle that a few people can produce a brutal product if they are not limited by:
- a) having to convince a larger organization of what it knows to be right
- b) whether they can devote their personal time to design, marketing or whatever, instead of managing others to do these tasks less well.
Note the sardonic tone and a certain disgust with the scale of power – or directly this veiled shot at the ignominious feeling of dealing with investors and profiles who ignore “the art of creating”. As it was, the letter not only remains on the surface and raises the following:
To stay true to this principle, I propose the following two ideas:
- We all need time to work individually without interruption. Meetings (suppliers, interviews, etc.) reduce our individual time and the productivity of our engineers is affected. I propose that we set aside every Thursday as a day without gatherings of any kind.. Thursday is our day, a day when we metaphorically close the doors to the outside world and work quietly individually.
- As we revise our staffing requirements (and subsequently our budgets) downward, I encourage you to remember that there is a fine line which, when crossed in staffing increases, makes you a manager rather than a contributor or team leader. I think if we become managers instead of “doing”, our schedule and the “greatness” of our product will suffer. Let’s not let that happen! It’s better to have fewer people, even if it means doing less. Let’s build our business slowly and carefully.
In typical Jobs sneer, the letter ended with “Let’s discuss these two ideas at our staff meeting tomorrow.” It is relevant to pay attention to tone and form – that “Let’s not let that happen!” so combative, but even more in the ideas that he will pursue throughout his career. Ideas he would eventually model in the following format, as reported by Media Inc:
- Meetings with few staff, from 3 to 5 people. If there are too many people, there will be misunderstandings, talks and chaos.
- small diary with no more than 3 items on the agenda. Three stitches are better than five if you close every stitch. The one that covers a lot…
- short meetings, no more than 30 minutes and with a clear structure.
Top image: David Paul Morris for Getty Images
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