In a team setting, it’s impossible for a group of people to coordinate what needs to get done without spending time on it. The larger the team, the more time is needed. As talented as we are, mind reading is not a core human competency. We need to establish common values within our team for how we make decisions and respond to problems. For manager

companies now deploy the Scrum project management methodology, which replaces a lot of this ad hoc messaging with regular, highly structured, and ruthlessly efficient status meetings (often held standing up to minimize the urge to bloviate). This approach frees up more managerial time for thinking deeply about the problems their teams are tackling,

Paul Graham of Y Combinator points out that makers (engineers) need long stretches of uninterrupted time to be productive, whereas managers are most effective when meeting. The compromise is to schedule days when no meetings are allowed. The schedule that works best for a five-day workweek is as follows: One day of internal meetings One day of exte

The key venue for freewheeling discourse was the Monday morning executive team gathering, which started at 9 and went for three or four hours. The focus was always on the future: What should each product do next? What new things should be developed? Jobs used the meeting to enforce a sense of shared mission at Apple. This served to centralize contr

Sculley reorganized the company repeatedly, each time trying to get back what Apple clearly had lost. He brought in a new executive staff to help. But all they were doing was trying to manage HOW the company worked when it was the WHY that needed attention.