Top CEO’s on How to Conduct Meetings

Drake Baer, Business Insider writer and entrepreneurship expert, shares some fantastic principles from a few of today’s top execs on how to conduct meetings. Here are a few excerpts from his article (full version here):

Opsware CEO and Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz likes to have one-to-one meetings.

Horowitz, who spends much of his time mentoring young leaders, says that most important job for a CEO is to architect the way people communicate in a company.

The one-to-one meeting is essential to that process, he says, as it’s the best place for ideas and critiques to flow up from employees to management.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg sticks to a strict agenda.

Sandberg brings a spiral-bound notebook with her to every meeting. In that notebook is a list of discussion points and action items.

“She crosses them off one by one, and once every item on a page is checked, she rips the page off and moves to the next,” Fortune reports. “If every item is done 10 minutes into an hour-long meeting, the meeting is over.”

The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs kept meetings as small as possible.

He ran meetings with a similar minimalism. He hated when they were too big, because too many minds in a room got in the way of simplicity.

Jobs carried the same standard with himself: When US President Barack Obama asked him to a meeting of tech darlings, he declined. The guest list was too long.

Google CEO Larry Page says no one should wait for a meeting to make a decision.

“No decision should ever wait for a meeting,” the email reads. “If a meeting absolutely has to happen before a decision should be made, then the meeting should be scheduled immediately.”

As you can tell, there’s no perfect agenda, no perfect structure and no one size fits all answer on how to conduct meetings. The idea is to make sure employees feel like their opinions are heard, that ideas come out and that there’s no settling for mediocrity.

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