Do Meetings “Work”?

From a former co-worker would come the frequent complaint, “Meetings don’t work.” It was a small-ish company, that grew while I was there from under twenty employees to over fifty. What bothered me the most about this complaint of my co-worker’s, apart from that it seemed to issue forth usually when what was being proposed was something that he didn’t want to do, was that he was a senior manager.

To my mind, a manager, in any capacity and in any department, should never shy away from meetings. It’s part of the job description of a Manager. There seems to be a misconception that being in a meeting entails not doing anything creative or not contributing novel ideas.

People frequently also complain, “Today was awful. I’ve been in meetings all day,” as if to say that they couldn’t have done anything of value, or been insightful, because the responsibility of being in meetings, even if they were running the meetings themselves or were called in as important contributors, distracts them from the insights that presumably were part of their “real” or intended duties and interests at work.

There need be nothing about a meeting that precludes a manager from being effective at their job. I can understand if someone whose responsibilities are more task-oriented (say, a developer who wants to not be distracted while s/he is learning the latest programming techniques and technologies) would have to be dragged into a meeting against their wishes, but managers live to synthesize information from others’ inputs. Nothing facilitates this better than a meeting. Effective and coherent strategy decisions shouldn’t be made on-the-fly, as the result of random collisions in cubicle corridors. A meeting should be the starting point for a manager to gather the inputs they need to make their decisions, and have them discussed in a large group so that the chance of receiving incorrect information is minimized.

A “day full of meetings” isn’t one where a manager has no time for introspection. There are gaps between meetings, and people show up late. Wireless access is something most employees of technology companies can take for granted now. Each meeting is an opportunity for a good manager to channel resources into the right projects, to stay up-to-date on what’s happening “in the trenches,” so to speak, and make the right calls to action that need to be communicated in the next meeting.

A series of meetings can be proof that a manager is doing his/her job more effectively, not less.

A Spectrum of Symbolisms

There are, ostensibly, two worlds — one of Nerds, and the other of Artists. The latter is noticeably hipper than the former, in general, ceteris paribus.

I have always been comfortable in both worlds. Honestly, I have. I can geek out with the best of them, talking at at least an average level of technical arcana, if not being resoundingly confident in my abstruseness. At the same time, I also empathize with the glory and the agony of most artistic souls.

One of my personal theses is that these two worlds can be bridged. At the root of my comfort at either end of this dichotomy, and also underlying my attempts to bridge these worlds, is the fact that at heart, every Tech Nerd is also an Artist. What is more, as Technology becomes more and more a lynchpin in the production of Art, the reverse is becoming true, as well.

To an audience, the work products of these two categories of creative beings, seem very different. This illusion exists because traditionally, Artists have been those that have catered to more of our senses, while Tech Nerds, or just Nerds, for short, are seen to deal solely in the beauty of the underlying ideas. The idea that therefore, these two categories lie at opposite ends of a spectrum of symbol-making, is almost antiquated now, as quaint as the idea that each one of us is either a Left Brained rationalist, or a Right Brained intuiter.

In reality, there is a seamless progression from an Artist of the Senses — the dancer, the cook, the painter — to the Artist of Abstract Ideas — the philosopher and the mathematician — with the Artist of Natural Language — the writer, the poet, the orator — existing somewhere in the middle. We, the Audience, react differently to all of them, but they have a more affectionately fraternal bond via a shared vocabulary of passions, than we can imagine.

Engineers are filled with a need for “creative expression,” as much as “proper” artists are, but few of them would thus articulate their motives. Engineers talk of wanting to “make things,” which is “creativity” too. The fruits of their labor seem, however, less “expressive” because a tool or program or system carries a finality that seemingly lies outside the personality of its creator. A car is only that thing that provides transport. A pot is only that thing which contains a plant. The engineer’s and the technician’s products are defined not by the creator but by the owner. Its form appears to be dictated by the user and by immutable laws of Physics, rather than by the personal philosophies of the its maker.

However, we must see that the functionality of an engineer’s creation does not emanate entirely from our desires. The engineer creates a new reality by virtue of having invented something. If that reality had not existed, we might not even have had the desires that we now deceive ourselves into thinking were the true genesis of that product. The needs that this new product seems to satisfy were in some sense called into being by the product itself having been invented. And the Engineer invented it because she wished to, rather than in response to our desires.

In this respect, the Enginee, or Nerd, is behaving no differently, and with no less independence and expressiveness, than an Artist. In fact, as our lives become more luxurious, and are serviced by technology in more and more mundane aspects, the aesthetics of techical design become as much a source of sensual joy as traditionally, the Arts have been. A well-designed ATM machine becomes something akin to walking into a gallery of artfully executed paintings, or watching a particularly good theater performance.

A First Salvo at the Problem of Culture

 

NPR ran a program just now, at a little past midnight, on their San Francisco channel, KQED. I was listening to News and Notes, a show run by Farai Chideya. According to the website for this program, “News & Notes explores fascinating issues and people from an African American perspective.” I need to get some more information on what I was listening to, but it appeared to be an interview of a medical professional, who, at least some of the time, practices non-mainstream techniques for healing the sick. One example was of knowing how to take the temperature in a more accurate way, using modern technologies, but prescribing herbal medicines if something untoward was detected. The impression I got was that the person being interviewed came from a family or some other lineage of non-mainstream practitioners of the medical profession.

The interviewer (possibly Chideya) asked if the use of knowledge embedded in the doctor’s “culture and tradition” made them wonder sometimes if patients were getting a worse treatment than if only modern methods were used. This got me to thinking about the effect of traditional practices in our lives, and the conflict generated with more modern epistemologies, often Western in origin.

The problem with tradition is that it is simultaneously the abstraction and encapsulation of detailed knowledge that has been acquired over many centuries, and also an excuse for refusing to learn more or to consider alternatives. Tradition is that thing which one does because it’s always been done that way, and also that thing which is done well now because it has been done for so long, that many generations have had the chance to iron out any errors and wrinkles that might have gone unnoticed had the process been subjected to such sustained scrutiny over many years.

The word “tradition” is a very severe example of collapsed categories. The idea of tradition depends on time and space. Almost universally, we agree that what is traditional in one place is not so in another. What is harder to notice is that even in the same place, it is hard to pinpoint when something has been around long enough in the same form, that it counts as traditional. People apply a convenient amnesia to an inconvenient tradition, forgetting enough details about it over time that it fades into oblivion. Most traditions go away because they have been ignored long enough, like an unwelcome suitor whom one never rejects outright but whose calls one never returns.

When a tradition can so easily slip from being established to endangered, and when radically different practices can all appear traditional when considered in different regions, the question is, what validity does the term itself have? Even without the pressures of modernity, the question is, what tradition could we call universal and absolute?

Modernity, in the form of science and individual rights, seems to have proposed an answer in the last few centuries, as the only true tradition that spans the entire human specie. Yet, we have roundly rejected most of the social impact of modernity across the globe. The clearest victory of modernity would have been a politically viable form of socialist government ruling over the majority of the globe that would also have been just and non-totalitarian. Such a utopia has failed to materialize, and present conditions indicate that its arrival is only being delayed, if not cancelled altogether.

Hence, tradition can only be an illusion which the race constructs to give it the consolation of having had a strong past. Without tradition, we feel unmoored from any examples or models that we can look up to as a race. We have to invent our convictions anew with each new generation, and that is a very uncomfortable feeling.

Requiem to the Fantastic Imagination

There is nothing left to write fantasies about, except witches and imaginary gods. There was a time, an era in which Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle or even earlier when Rabelais and Swift imagined fantastical things, when the Universe was still mysterious. The workings of the world around us were unknown to us, and there was drama in imagining where the limits of our knowledge would lie and what would happen when we pioneered human consciousness to those limits.

Those days are now gone, not because Science has uncovered everything there is to know, but because it has at least exposed the essential aspects of everything. We know how big things can become, and what will happen when they become that big — distances, sizes or amounts of energy. More importantly, we know the limits of human perception. Technology will not allow us to see a quark, even if it allows us to conceive of such a thing in our minds and mathematical models.

Even William Gibson admits of the impossibility of predicting the future, in a recent interview with Silicon.com. The implication of this which Gibson doesn’t touch upon is that, bereft of this once-fertile fount of story-telling, we are forced to move on to realms that simply cannot exist, rather than those that only don’t exist in the present but might come to fruition some day. The popularity of Harry Potter is partially explained by our thirst for worlds far away from ours, but close enough that the sentiments and conflicts still sound human. Earlier, this shift was achieved by injecting a dose of technological advances, but today, it has to be done via a wave of a magic wand, or the arrival in our world of not just alien, but completely imaginary beings. The strangers in our fantasies are not aliens who we have to fear, strike a camaraderie with, or at least anthromorphize mildly so that they fit in our stories; they have been laid off and replaced with interchangeable characters from our hoary myths, legends and sacraments.

Where will we go from here? The answer is obvious — our mind and its inner mechanics. This final frontier, already being explored for over six decades, still largely remains a mystery. The cartography of our consciousness is as exciting to imagine, report on and travel through as the unexplored wildernesses were to pre-Information Age travelers of uninhabited geographies. Everything we know today about our neural pathways is largely conjecture, even though it is admittedly conjecture that is deeply informed and that serves admirably well in explaining the ways in which humans behave and react to their surroundings.

The gaps left behind by our fuzzy understanding of our minds are fallow grounds to plant our exotic imaginings, like patches of alleyways between concrete blocks of city buildings. What is unknown is both the framework and the potential of the mind. It’s not just a question of how it functions, but how much more it can do, that will become the subject of our fantasies for ourselves. Whether we can learn to love and rage and aspire and hate with a greater range than we have shown already; whether we can acquire new emotions even that we haven’t even named; whether we will interact with each other in vaster numbers of ways — all this remains to be written about and, of course, to be shaped and fulfilled in reality.

A Shift In Perspective

I joined Yahoo! a short while ago, after having spent a few years at startups/small companies. I see the world now through purple-colored lenses, and look forward to the views that this change in perspective brings me. I have never worked at a “big” company before, and have never worked with teams larger than perhaps a dozen people, and all that is going to change in my life.

I am being mysterious here, because I would like to remain as anonymous as possible. Perhaps this blog will always remain undiscovered and perhaps it won’t. All the same, it is better that I speak about myself in generality, because I will speak of my experiences, and those around me, at Yahoo! with much more specificity, and I would rather not accidentally expose myself to disapproval from my co-workers. Nothing I will write here, hopefully, will be confidential and drop me into legal hot water, but some of it might certainly be mildly insulting, if not incendiary.

My experiences at Yahoo!, especially where it is now as a company, are rich fodder for a lot of philosophical thinking about the nature of work, and human interactions. Yahoo! is not the media’s darling, and it has had to report failing profit growth. However, Yahoo! still holds a commanding presence on the battlefield of Internet search/media/life-engine companies, and quite a lot of that glory owes itself to the work of some very successful groups within Yahoo!. These groups are rightfully proud of what they do, and their pride leads to a fair amount of jealousy in turn from those that are not part of this elite. All of this leads to a lot of grandstanding, internal bickering, navel gazing and heartburn in various quantities. Students of theatre and literature will readily recognize the most apposite ingredients for a first-rate drama, or, at the very least, a ratings-leading soap opera.

Today, for example, I realized that there are a few schools of argument that frequently pop up in discussions, and to members of that school, all support and opposition relies on a few succinct tenets. No wonder these mail list discussions have long been known as “religious wars.”

One of these schools asks, “Why copy Google?” All company products and product decisions are judged on the basis of whether Google has already done it, and if it has, the decision is somehow tainted. Another school asks, “Will this lead to more ads?” and automatically assumes that more ads will kill the success, beauty or some other desirable, if ineffable, quality of the product.

What is interesting is when two of these schools collide, as in when “Why copy Google?” is challenged with “Because it reduces the number of ads.” There is of course no logic inherent in these arguments, because there is no axiomatic system that is agreed upon. It is truly a battle of ideas, meaning not, in the generally accepted sense that ideas are debated upon via some rational dialectic, but that Ideas — Concepts encapsulated in pithy statements like “The search experience has improved,” or “This will reduce infrastructural overlap” — are used as weapons to bludgeon each other over the head with.

If this is not the way of Politics, I don’t know what is.

It’s “What To Do,” not “How To Do It.”

So I leading a meeting as a product manager, at my big Internet search/media/life-engine company, and I am trying to brainstorm requirements with two engineering managers for a new project. I have heard many times before that I should never, in such meetings, tell engineers how to do something, and rather leave them with a sense of what needs to be done, so that they can figure out how to do it on their own.

This is sound advice because engineers, being engineers, love figuring out how to do things. Never get in the way of an engineer and his/her solution; they treasure it as their own as a sale-hunting shopper would the perfect dress that is marked an additional 50% off. Yet, I was foolish enough yet again not to follow this advice, and started offering solutions in the meeting.

What I realized later is that it’s not that I am wilful or impatient, but that I really do have trouble internalizing this piece of counsel. I can’t instinctively draw the line between requirement and solution, and frequently make the solution part of the problem. For example, on this occasion, the requirement was fairly simple — what service-level agreement the new system was to provide. Instead of asking the engineers that they agree to putting some SLA on the roadmap, I went on to suggest ways to provide different SLAs — perhaps we could allow for users to plug in their own hardware, I said, or alternatively, we would worry about that entirey on our own and implement a resource allocation algorithm. It took a gentle smackdown from both engineers, before I realized that it was not in my place to provide these solutions.

I figure part of the reason I do this is because I have been an engineer myself, so it’s hard to shake off the habit. The other half of the explanation lies in something else that goes on in my brain, which is that I don’t quickly understand the hierarchy of requirements. In any product, or product development process, some requirements come before others. Higher requirements must be understood first, and in attempting to implement these, lower-level requirements will surface. Attempting to incubate the lower-level requirements ahead of time is usually counter-productive — the higher-level requirement will be malformed at birth, and the lower-level requirement will probably be still-born.

To return to my post-mortem of the meeting, the higher-level requirement was the provision of an SLA. It’s possible that once we start implementing an SLA, we’ll find ourselves strapped of resources to offer a reliable service to all our customers, and that I will then have to insist that we make the system capable of plugging in dedicated hardware provided by customers who are willing to pay their way to better service. However, that is a bridge that I, as a product manager, will have to be patient, and prepared, enough to cross when we come to it.