Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2015. The description of Apple as “the largest technology company in the world” reflects its position in 2015.
From a marketing point of view, the key to Steve Jobs’s success, and therefore Apple’s, was simplicity. In fact, Apple’s products pursue simplicity over complexity (which is what most companies desperately pursue).
And Jobs carried simplicity over even into company meetings. Drawing on Ken Segall’s account in his book Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, we can pin down the 3 keys Jobs used to make meetings successful without wearing people out.
Put the following way, the points may seem in poor taste, since they are based on what Segall saw while working with Apple, but once we expand on the arguments, their logic is overwhelming.
The 3 points of a successful meeting:
- Throw the least necessary person out of the room.
- Leave the meeting if it lasts more than 30 minutes.
- Do something productive to justify the time you’re going to spend on it.
1. Very small groups made up only of smart people.
In a previous article on how Apple made its meetings more productive, we described how Steve Jobs fixed his gaze on one of the people attending a meeting and asked her to leave because he didn’t consider her necessary.
The idea is quite basic: the people in a meeting should be there for a reason, not just because that’s what’s expected.
Steve Jobs wanted every attendee, a very small group of the company’s smartest and most creative people, to be in the meeting because they would be key participants in it.
Most companies call a huge number of overcrowded meetings over the course of a year, with more spectators than participants, and they often end up rambling and dealing with trivial matters.
If you were in a meeting with Steve Jobs, it was because the company was going to need your opinion.
2. If you want to waste time, give an idea to a large group of people.
Jobs was clear that an overcrowded meeting only served to waste time. “If you want to water down great ideas, give them to a big group of people.”
Many companies create large groups because a company’s culture is much bigger than any one person’s, and the aim of these crowded meetings is for the bits of knowledge of a large number of people to add up to the significant knowledge needed to solve a problem or come up with a good idea (all together).
But that rarely happens. For Segall, it is far more effective to have a few people, as long as they are the smartest ones. Less time is wasted, there may be some disagreements (but smart people understand each other), and every idea is welcome.
That way, the meeting doesn’t drag on, nobody gets bored, and everything you hear is smart and productive for the company.
People tend to think that more brains mean more ideas. That’s hard to argue with, but Jobs amply demonstrated that a few smart brains come up with better ideas than many ordinary ones.
Unnecessary, overcrowded meetings can stifle the brightest and most creative people.
A question many managers ask, and one I’ve answered myself, is: What’s the best day and time for a company meeting? While there may be an ideal time, the truth is that you should avoid at all costs having a fixed weekly slot in the calendar for a routine meeting, because a meeting should only be held when there are important matters to discuss.
If, on top of being unnecessary, the meeting is boring and goes off on tangents every week, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the most hated day of the week for employees. Done right, they should be looking forward to a meeting: it’s their chance to shine, their moment to contribute ideas, to be heard, to push the company forward.
If employees don’t feel that way, something isn’t being done right.
3. Think big, but act small.
This was one of Apple’s principles:
“Do you know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We work like a startup, but we’re the biggest startup on the planet.”
Steve Jobs said these words at a conference in 2010. He didn’t want to change what had made the company successful. He didn’t want hierarchies, or departments that had to oversee the decisions of other departments.
There were the smart people in charge of the projects, and there was Steve Jobs. If an idea sounded good, Steve Jobs approved it. There wasn’t much more red tape than that.
Steve Jobs also gave people the freedom to think up all kinds of ideas. One of his most famous lines was: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do.”
According to Segall, who also worked with other technology companies, this kind of intelligent simplicity is what kept Apple from ever getting bogged down in bureaucracy. Despite being the largest technology company in the world, it had the agility of a small business.
Further reading
- Ken Segall: Steve Jobs wasn’t a jerk, just an extremely honest person
- Unseen photos of Steve Jobs that capture the moment a few crazy ones changed the world
- 11 Steve Jobs quotes that will go down in business history
Featured image: matt buchanan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
