I agree with this, except that I think Page ignores two important meeting types: Q&As and Working Sessions. Maybe Page defines a meeting as having >3 members, but many of my non-salesy meetings are these two types.
Q&As: Today, I was working on a demo for a customer. I am a Data & AI person, and the demo concerned data processing for cybersecurity, so I got on a meeting with a cybersecurity expert working on the same demo. I asked him to walk me through his typical day working with a particular software product, asked a bunch of questions, and had everything I needed for the demo in 30 minutes. We could have done this through slack with a bunch of Looms, but it would have taken 4x as long and broken up his flow a lot more. Oftentimes, we will have one person on the team dive deep into a particular technology and give us a lecture + Q&A on what we need to know about it for our current project and the best resources to learn more.
Working Sessions: Sometimes you need to build something that interacts with a separate component that someone else is currently working on. Sometimes several people are working on the same project. Sometimes a junior engineer at my mostly-remote company needs an opportunity to learn some SWE fundamentals. These are situations where, pre-remote work, I would camp out next to their desk or in a conference room and we would work through things together. Now, a meeting serves the same purpose.
I don't think your example is at odds with the content of the article. The sentiment is to make sure meetings are meaningful and only with the people that need to be attending them. It's not that meetings are inherently bad, but that it's easy for them to become excessive and frequent. Meetings are necessary and useful, but they can also create a lot of unproductive time. To me when they do it's a sign that the business is being taken over by bureaucrats. Because they don't want to work to accomplish things, they want to work to work.
The problem with what CEOs like Page do here is that they are out of touch. It’s easy to say things like this when everyone is paid to listen to you and do whatever you want.
You can make these bold statements that sound insightful but at the end of the day there are many reasons why I would like to talk to some teammates, or another team, that don’t have an action or a decision attached to it.
After being fully remote for over five years now, I will say something unpopular and that is face time is valuable. Humans are complicated and empathetic and value is lost if we only ever interact in a slack thread or over a faceless Zoom call where I just stare at your name on a black box for 30 minutes.
Meetings without an agenda are a waste of time? I guess you just don’t value human contact at all, so that tells me more about you than it does about the quality of your meetings. Me? I can learn a lot about how a project is going simply by listening and watching someone talk about it and that context will be completely stripped from an email, chat or zoom tile.
But CEOs are widely considered to be overrepresented with dark triad psychological traits. We shouldn’t be surprised when they just don’t get people and want to throw away things they can’t immediately extract value from.
How can executives become executives without understanding the purpose and function of meetings.
I feel like I had this sorted out in ‘95, and assumed everyone got it straight at about the same age (~30).
MEETINGS ARE NOT CODE. They are not necessarily part of any logical machinery of business. They do not necessarily perform a pivotal function in the moment. They are, however, part of a vital social process of building and managing business relationships regarding shared responsibility. This is why people keep calling them. Not always or necessarily because of decisions to be made.
If a meeting doesn’t need me or care about me I won’t go. Or I’ll leave. This is a rare occurrence on projects.
> if you think you would rather send an AI to attend a meeting for you rather than waste your time, your life, on that meeting, consider just taking it to email
That’s essentially what I’m doing when sending an AI. We don’t use zoom, but I’ll join Teams meetings, zoom out and work on something else while people have endless meaningless circular discussions near the end I’ll ask copilot to summarize points and actions and just ask people if they agree that there are those actions for them saved me having to sit and waste my attention on the meeting that could have been an e-mail or teams discussion.
> if you think you would rather send an AI to attend a meeting for you rather than waste your time, your life, on that meeting, consider just taking it to email, or not having that meeting at all
Oh hey, my thoughts every time I’m pitched a new customer service chat bot.
We're already seeing LLMs being used to write emails that are then summarized by other LLMs, having AIs attend pointless meetings with other AIs is just the next evolution.
(To be clear, I don't particularly like or want this, but it seems inevitable.)
Quite often the meeting starts as “let me pick your brain on something“. This kind of expert advice from AI would save time and improve productivity of the team.
Or, in other words, if you meant it as a joke, it's not bad. But if you meant it seriously, I doubt many people find it useful to pick your brain-- you have so little respect for yourself that you believe you have already been replaced by AI.
Readit News
Q&As: Today, I was working on a demo for a customer. I am a Data & AI person, and the demo concerned data processing for cybersecurity, so I got on a meeting with a cybersecurity expert working on the same demo. I asked him to walk me through his typical day working with a particular software product, asked a bunch of questions, and had everything I needed for the demo in 30 minutes. We could have done this through slack with a bunch of Looms, but it would have taken 4x as long and broken up his flow a lot more. Oftentimes, we will have one person on the team dive deep into a particular technology and give us a lecture + Q&A on what we need to know about it for our current project and the best resources to learn more.
Working Sessions: Sometimes you need to build something that interacts with a separate component that someone else is currently working on. Sometimes several people are working on the same project. Sometimes a junior engineer at my mostly-remote company needs an opportunity to learn some SWE fundamentals. These are situations where, pre-remote work, I would camp out next to their desk or in a conference room and we would work through things together. Now, a meeting serves the same purpose.
You can make these bold statements that sound insightful but at the end of the day there are many reasons why I would like to talk to some teammates, or another team, that don’t have an action or a decision attached to it.
After being fully remote for over five years now, I will say something unpopular and that is face time is valuable. Humans are complicated and empathetic and value is lost if we only ever interact in a slack thread or over a faceless Zoom call where I just stare at your name on a black box for 30 minutes.
Meetings without an agenda are a waste of time? I guess you just don’t value human contact at all, so that tells me more about you than it does about the quality of your meetings. Me? I can learn a lot about how a project is going simply by listening and watching someone talk about it and that context will be completely stripped from an email, chat or zoom tile.
But CEOs are widely considered to be overrepresented with dark triad psychological traits. We shouldn’t be surprised when they just don’t get people and want to throw away things they can’t immediately extract value from.
I feel like I had this sorted out in ‘95, and assumed everyone got it straight at about the same age (~30).
MEETINGS ARE NOT CODE. They are not necessarily part of any logical machinery of business. They do not necessarily perform a pivotal function in the moment. They are, however, part of a vital social process of building and managing business relationships regarding shared responsibility. This is why people keep calling them. Not always or necessarily because of decisions to be made.
If a meeting doesn’t need me or care about me I won’t go. Or I’ll leave. This is a rare occurrence on projects.
That’s essentially what I’m doing when sending an AI. We don’t use zoom, but I’ll join Teams meetings, zoom out and work on something else while people have endless meaningless circular discussions near the end I’ll ask copilot to summarize points and actions and just ask people if they agree that there are those actions for them saved me having to sit and waste my attention on the meeting that could have been an e-mail or teams discussion.
Oh hey, my thoughts every time I’m pitched a new customer service chat bot.
(To be clear, I don't particularly like or want this, but it seems inevitable.)
Or, in other words, if you meant it as a joke, it's not bad. But if you meant it seriously, I doubt many people find it useful to pick your brain-- you have so little respect for yourself that you believe you have already been replaced by AI.