How Chat And Youth Are Killing The Meeting

From Forbes

Dan Woods, 04.13.10, 06:00 AM EDT

A friend who is a chief technology officer at a successful Internet startup reported a fascinating change. When he worked for a 50-something chief executive, his schedule was crammed with meetings, taking up as many as 30 hours a week. When a new 20-something CEO arrived, meeting time shrank to about 2 hours a week.

The company began to be run through unstructured collaboration. A never-ending management stream-of-consciousness based on e-mail, instant messaging and internal social media became the center of the action. This style of working is taking hold at many young companies.

Can you run a company through e-mail and chat without meetings, without ever getting together in the same room or at the same time? At first, the answer seems to be yes. But there is a lot more going on here.

Meetings have long been known to waste time. Wal-Mart ( WMT -news - people ) has people stand up in meetings to keep them short.

In addition, for more than a decade we have lived in e-mail and engaged in time-shifted communication among ad hoc groups. President Obama refused to give up his Blackberry because this sort of communication is so vital and valuable. Instant messaging and chat systems keep us in touch with close colleagues so that we can have quick interactions. Social media have extended this radically, enabling collaboration to include a much larger number of people. Andy Mulholland, the chief technology officer of Capgemini, calls this "strong collaboration" in his book Mesh Collaboration.

The roots of this working style come from the operations staff. During a Web site launch, for example, the ops team opens an Internet Relay Chat (or IRC) channel and people report in about what they are doing, ask questions and describe problems. The CTO or vice president of ops monitors the channel and makes decisions on the fly as the issues come up, instead of waiting for a meeting to be called. The increase in communication and time savings is dramatic.

The cost: Everyone must be monitoring the IRC channel. Usually, the ops team would make such a channel active and required at moments of intense activity. After the Web site gets launched, the IRC channel goes back to being used only by the ops staff.

Certain 20-something CEOs are happy to be online in a number of instant messaging groups all day in a way that most 50-something CEOs are not. It's not surprising that young executives like IM and older ones don't. But there are some crucial issues that digital natives may ignore at their peril.

The positive part of meetingless management is that it assumes everyone is doing his or her job and checking in if they need help. It is an empowered, management-by-exception model. The meetings that the 50-something CEO held were a way to enforce control, to keep people from working on their own. The digital native CEO says implicitly, "I trust you. Take care of it, and let me know if you need help."

In my friend's startup, this works well because the focus is a Web site, the roles are clear, and there are few competing priorities. The CEO sets the product vision, and the company makes it happen. Google ( GOOG - news - people ), I'm told by insiders, solves conflicts by looking at the data. If a certain change will help one division in France but hurt another in America, they look at the traffic and revenue involved and someone makes the call quickly. The data is king.

But could the meetingless approach work in an organization that had competing priorities or where the data is less clear? Can budgets or financial performance be predicted with any reasonable degree of accuracy? The digital-native CEOs I know are long on guerrilla war bravado and short on process.

To succeed in the long term and at scale, stream-of-consciousness management must be supplemented in the following ways:

--Project managers must monitor the stream of activity and capture knowledge so that what is taking place can be reviewed and analyzed later.

--Checklists or defined processes must be in place so that the staff has guidance and a way to capture what they have learned about how to do their jobs better.

--A mechanism to provide clarity of plans and intentions must exist so that everyone can see what everyone else is doing and conflicts or contradictions can be identified early.

--Some form of conflict resolution must exist so that problems raised are certain to get attention.

--Resources consumed and progress toward defined goals must be monitored as closely as possible and reported frequently.

--There must be a forum for brainstorming and fellowship so that everyone can enjoy each other's company and learn from everyone else.

At my friend's company, everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the tyranny of meetings ended. Will they be happy a year from now? Will the board of directors be happy? Empowerment needs some structure to avoid confusion and at worst chaos. Stream-of-consciousness management must take place within a defined context to succeed in the long term. It is the rare chief executive of any age that gets this balance right.