How to Conduct Meetings Efficiently like Google, the Larry Page way

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, took over CEO job from Eric Schmidt last year. Since then the meetings in Google are conducted very efficiently according to Kristen Gil, VP of Google Business Operations. She said in Think Quarterly magazine, they found a wide discrepancy in the effectiveness of their meetings.

"One of our first observations was that many meetings weren’t working as well as they should. A well-run meeting is a great thing; it empowers people to make decisions, solve problems, and share information. But badly-run meetings are a demoralizing waste of time. We didn’t want our employees to waste either time or energy, so we gathered input and made some recommendations to help make meetings more effective."

So, Larry Page and Google changed the meeting setup as follows:

• Every decision-oriented meeting should have a clear decision maker, if the condition not met then there should be no meeting.
• The meetings should not exceed more than 10 people for an effective meeting.
• Every person in the meeting should give inputs or not attend.
• Everyone should be present at the start of the meeting, no delays because of their absence.
• Any decision shouldn't wait for a meeting to be implemented, but if it is a critical decision then a meeting should be scheduled before implementing.

Since the changes were implemented, they have made number of important decisions such as the introduction of Google+ and the unbelievable number of features they have added ever since they started it last year.


Instead of attending the meeting just for the sake of it, I hope everyone follows this or similar rules to improve the effectiveness of a meeting.