Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

Summary

Back in 2011, Larry Page became the CEO of Google in place of Eric Schmidt. This happened at a time when Google was feeling the growing pains of becoming a huge company. It had 30,000 employees and was growing rapidly. But you could really feel the weight; projects were getting more ambitious, taking longer, and often failing more spectacularly.At the time, I remember an anecdote told by Larry Page. He said that companies like Yahoo! used to be a punchline at Google because it would take them weeks to get something onto their homepage. Google could accomplish the same thing in a few hours, or a few days at worst. But now he was the CEO of a company where it took weeks to get something onto the homepage, and he was sure that he was the butt of some startup’s jokes.Anyways, all of this clearly bothered Larry Page. He wanted to fix it. One of his first actions was to shutter tons of projects that didn’t make tactical or strategic sense, and focus on fewer efforts. This came with the catch phrase “more wood behind fewer arrows.” For example, they shuttered Google Buzz so that it wouldn’t distract from Google+.And second, Larry Page emailed the whole company a ham-fisted attempt to revamp how meetings were done.Every meeting needed a “decision-maker.”Meetings should be capped at 10 people.Everybody in a meeting should give input or they shouldn’t be in the meeting.Hour-long meetings should be only 50 minutes to give the participants an opportunity to use the restroom between meetings.They later softened some of the language by saying that these were properties of “decision-oriented meetings,” implying there were other types of meetings that someone might need to attend. But you could never shake the feeling that Larry Page had to make decisions all day long and forgot that sometimes people meet for other reasons.Anyways, let’s focus on the fact that Larry Page wanted hour-long meetings to only be 50 minutes. This is a good thing! It gives people a chance to stretch, go t...