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INNOVATION April 28, 2008, 2:15PM EST

How to Make Meetings Matter

They're a crucial part of the business process, but if your meetings are planned on autopilot, you're probably not sending the
right message

by Jessie Scanlon

Perry Klebahn has run a lot of companywide meetings since he took over as CEO of ailing bag company Timbuk2 in January, 2007. It's been a period of
change, of difficult decisions, of executive departures, and he wanted to keep the 70 employees of the San Francisco company informed and engaged.
But what he'd hoped would be an open forum for discussion turned into an awkward weekly event.

"People braced themselves for the meetings because they'd become a time to broadcast the latest changes," says Klebahn, who admits planning for the
company meetings wasn't on his list of top priorities.

That's typical: For most business leaders, planning for a meeting amounts to making a list of agenda items or talking points. But the all-company
meeting—or any meeting, for that matter—deserves more attention, even if you're not leading a company through a turnaround. That's because meetings
play a powerful role in corporate life. They are both a reflection of an organization's culture and a means of reinforcing that culture. So in big and small and
sometimes trivial ways, meetings send employees a message about the company, and if meetings are planned on autopilot, you're probably not sending
the right message.

MEETING DESIGN
Klebahn was lucky —as a graduate of Stanford's product design program and a part-time professor there since 1996 (he's taught product design and
several classes in the D-School, including a design-thinking "boot camp"), he's friends with two professors who were teaching a D-School course about
applying design principles to business processes or systems. The idea was to treat an organization as a prototype to be refined and improved. In one
project, for instance, students had worked with an airline to uncover and propose improvements to the passenger travel experience.

The professors—Robert Sutton, an expert in organizational behavior and author of, most recently, The No Asshole Rule, and Debra Dunn, a 22-year
veteran of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) who held leadership positions in the marketing, manufacturing, and human resources divisions before moving to
corporate HQ, where she helped drive initiatives such as the Agilent spin-off—approached Klebahn about a short, Timbuk2-based project for the class
and homed in on the meeting as the right-sized problem. It was, says Dunn, "small enough for students to wrap their arms around and large enough that it
would make a significant impact. Meetings have tremendous symbolic power."

"I was focused on saving the company," says Klebahn. "We had four warehouses and needed to shut down three of them. There were ergonomic safety
issues in the office, and you don't talk about safety issues—you fix them. I just didn't think that much about the culture until Bob [Sutton] said to me: 'If
you destroy the culture, then you destroy the company.'"

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

So on Feb. 6, 2008, Sutton, Dunn, and 14 students took a bus up to San Francisco to observe a company meeting. As Sutton recalls, most people in the
meeting were standing or sitting on the floor. "The sun was glaring through the windows, forcing many to shield their eyes. You couldn't tell who was in
charge. Some people were called on to give status reports didn't have anything to report," he says. "There was no mention of Timbuk2's product or its
customers. There was no food. One person fell asleep."

Sounds disastrous, right? The D-School team couldn't have asked for anything better. "The meeting was so broken," says Sutton. "Everyone was
remarkably unenthusiastic. Very few people talked. They just listened to these announcements by Perry and his executive team." Through their
observations and follow-up interviews with employees, it became clear that the meeting—from its top-down format to its chairless location—was sending a
clear message to the staff: We're so busy dealing with important organizational issues that we don't have time for you.

Suffice it to say this was not what Klebahn had intended. Two weeks after the class had observed the meeting, Klebahn and his management team met
with the students to hear their proposed solutions, most of which focused on giving employees more control and a greater sense of ownership of the
meeting.

IMPORTANT CHANGES
Klebahn was quick to act on the ideas. Perhaps the single most important change he made was to delegate the planning and the running of the meeting to
his office manager, Keri Sedor. As a practical matter, this allowed him to stay focused on big-picture issues, but it also shifted the dynamic of the
gathering. Because Sedor is closer to the staff than members of the executive team, she's better able to solicit ideas or tap into issues that need airing.
The Sedor-run meetings are also more collaborative, in part because employees feel comfortable asking her questions.

Some of the changes Klebahn and team made were small. They moved the gathering from the kitchen area to the lobby where there was more seating.
They shifted from a weekly 30-minute format on Wednesday at 11 a.m. to a biweekly 90-minute gathering at 3:30, simply because that worked better for
most people. Others were more involved. A bulletin board in the kitchen was turned into a sort of ongoing conversation about issues and ideas to be
discussed. And to introduce some fun, at each meeting a randomly selected employee gets a custom bag, designed to reflect his or her personal interests

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How to Make Meetings Matter http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content/apr2008/id20080428_601886.htm

or hobbies. "This ritual reinforces that we make stuff, that we're a creative company, that we care about individuals," says Klebahn. "It also gets lots of
laughs."

For a complete list of the solutions the D-School team developed for Timbuk2, click here. The same principles will help any CEO or team leader
improve—and probably rethink—their meetings. As Klebahn says: "It's radically changed our focus of what the meeting is doing. It's not broadcasting
information. It's building a tribe."

Jessie Scanlon is the senior writer for Innovation & Design on BusinessWeek.com.

Copyright 2000-2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

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