A Culture of Meetings

Somewhere in the evolution of a growing company, meetings take over. At the time, it seems like a good idea because the product roadmap is all over the floor, key people are quitting, or there’s lots of yelling in the hallways. Whatever the disaster, a single well-led, efficient meeting with the right people provided a solution to a hard problem. Those who were watching noticed and thought, “Alright, we now have a new tool to solve problems — it’s called a meeting.”

With this fresh sense of validation, meetings spring up all over the place. They become the fashionable solution to problem solving — to making progress. More folks are invited to these affairs because everyone believes that if you’re invited to a meeting, you are somehow more professionally relevant. People start becoming scarce around the building, checking someone’s free/busy schedule becomes part of the culture, and suddenly we’re worrying more about the care and feeding of meetings than getting shit done.

Meetings must exist, but meetings cannot be seen as the only solution for making progress. If you must meet, start the meeting by remembering the definition of a successful meeting is that when the meeting is done, it need never occur again.

Rands hits the nail on the head here. The rest of the article is a must read on how to run an efficient meeting.

There is a point in many large companies where meetings become perceived as "getting work done." The problem is, people become impossible to find because they're always in meetings. There's people whose job it is to be in meetings (usually "management").

This, combined with people's natural tendency to procrastinate and not prepare for meetings (usually because they're running around in other meetings) simply leads to a culture that isn't agile. A company that can't respond to changes in the marketplace and be efficient.

One of my favorite college professors, who was part of the executive team that turned around Oxy in the late 80s/early 90s, always said that they didn't have meetings to plan meetings, they just did.

Quantifying just how much taxpayer money will have been wasted on the hastily developed Volt is no easy feat. Start with the $50 billion bailout (without which none of this would have been necessary), add $240 million in Energy Department grants doled out to G.M. last summer, $150 million in federal money to the Volt’s Korean battery supplier, up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives, and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for “retooling” its plants, and you’ve got some idea of how much taxpayer cash is built into every Volt.

With this much taxpayer money being sunk into the Chevy Volt, it's unbelievable we're not all getting a free one.

Sure GM is profitable TODAY, but the amount of cost that was sunk into all this will be tough for the US taxpayers to get back. It's that same kind of short sighted thinking that got us into the mess we're in today.

I've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I've already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done.

I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

Let’s put the fact that people respond to incentives to work for us, instead of working against it. If your state is struggling with its finances, consider, instead of raising taxes, lowering them the more people make. Perhaps institute a maximum threshold: once your income reaches a certain level, no taxes at all. If New Jersey, for example, did something like that, potentially thousands of disaffected wealthy people would flock there from the surrounding states, which would have all sorts of beneficial consequences. It might reverse New Jersey’s currently bleak demographic trends, and, given Laffer-esque effects of lower taxes, it might actually help it address its more-than-bleak fiscal situation.

The most obvious solution isn't always the best. If a government is struggling with money, raising taxes (increasing revenues) isn't always what will fix the problem - often times, something like lowering taxes might have spill over into other industries, incentivize people to to do something. Obviously this only works for a city in distress - somewhere like New York City isn't hurting to bring big business to their city.

The advantage to incentivizing businesses to move is that today in the United States, we have an infrastructure that allows businesses to be located anywhere. It used to be that being located near an ocean or river would help, but in today's information society, with telecommuting, phones, and the internet, I could start a business in Montana and still be in contact with people.

Everyone hates taxes, so why not put them to work for us?

As the federal government becomes the dominant body in society, it makes what was once flexible and agile—the many states—into something slow and rigid. The federal government cannot experiment because failure would affect the entire nation. But worse, this process has shifted societal responsibility from the local and private spheres into the national and public spheres. Poverty is no longer our individual responsibility, for us to work with friends in our communities to alleviate, but a national one. Depending on oil for powering our economy isn’t something for individuals to solve by forming new ventures that succeed based on economic viability, but a problem for Congress to solve by choosing what alternative form of energy, and existing companies, will succeed. Nothing is my problem anymore. It’s the government’s.

That’s eliminating personal responsibility. When the government is responsible for everything, there’s no dynamism, no motivation to create something for ourselves.

We need a new frontier.

I feel like I'm linking to Kyle Baxter's TightWind all the time here, but the guy writes the truth.

Massachusetts implemented an almost identical healthcare system to what Democrats passed this spring. Their “reform” has not only failed to reduce healthcare prices in Massachusetts, but has made it more expensive. Predictably, the state implemented price controls on insurance providers, which promptly led to $116 million in losses for the top five state insurers. Three are under administrative oversight because there are concerns they will fail.

So, what is the state’s solution? More control. Not only more control, actually, but taking absolute control of the medical industry in Massachusetts:

Naturally, Mr. Patrick wants to export the rate review beyond the insurers to hospitals, physician groups and specialty providers—presumably to set medical prices as well as insurance prices. Last month, his administration also announced it would use the existing state “determination of need” process to restrict the diffusion of expensive medical technologies like MRI machines and linear accelerator radiation therapy.

Meanwhile, Richard Moore, a state senator from Uxbridge and an architect of the 2006 plan, has introduced a new bill that will make physician participation in government health programs a condition of medical licensure. This would essentially convert all Massachusetts doctors into public employees.

Price controls don't work. They never have and they never will, and it can be explained with very elementary economics. This isn't a Republicans vs Democrats argument or even a Keynes vs Hayek economic debate. I will use basic rules of Supply and Demand here that are generally accepted as "laws" of economics.

Using the basic rules of supply and demand, you assume there is an equilibrium price set where supply and demand meet. When you institute price controls, you move below this equilibrium price. Essentially what this does is decrease the available supply of healthcare and increase demand.

This isn't rocket science - you lower price and Supply goes down and Demand goes up. What you end up with is a shortage of healthcare, not extra. What happens then? An "increase" in the natural price.

I don't doubt that these senators don't have the best intentions. We all want less expensive healthcare, but treat the cause, not the symptom. The cause of the high cost of healthcare here is due to malpractice litigation, administrative costs associated, cost prediction, and the fact that healthcare is 80% preventative. These are words straight from the mouth of the administrator of one of the largest and most successful health practices in the state and country.

Tackle those issues and we'll see the cost go down, I guarantee.

Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements.
If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more.

In an era today where movie trailers literally give away the entire plot of a movie - this one got me very intrigued. No gimmicks, no social media, no giant "Learn more here!!!" - just a very minimal tease that definitely has me wanting to know more.

Well done.

Whatever my kids are doing, whatever they want to do, whatever part of their school day they’re describing, it’s the single most important thing in their life. They latch onto something and they throw their very soul into it. My son does not just draw trucks. He draws the shit out of those trucks. My daughter doesn’t just wrestle with me. She growls like a bear and launches herself throw the air, totally fearless, hell bent on dragging me to the ground. They don’t just play Candyland together. They sweat over every card they draw, curse the gods and gnash their teeth when the other gains the lead, and the celebration when they win is one stadium short of a SuperBowl.

Their passion, in every moment, overflows. It’s vibrant, almost tangible, a stream of energy that whips around them like liquid fire. There is no walking, there is only running. There is no kiss good night, there is only fierce hugs and 300 “I-love-you“s and “you’re-my-best-friend“s before I close the door. Sometimes, it’s contagious. Mostly, it’s exhausting.

We “adults” watch our kids race around like cats with their tails on fire, sip our lattes, and question where they get “all that energy”.

But it’s the wrong question.

It’s not about them having something we don’t. It’s about them having something we lost. Instead, we should ask ourselves: at what point did we wander from the path of living? At what point did we lose our passion? Because that’s what fuels the little ones. Unfiltered, high-octane, 100% organic passion for that very second that they’re living in right now. At what moment was our fire stifled?

In a lecture delivered on June 17th at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think-tank in London, Gary Becker proposed a “radical solution” to this messy problem. Fittingly for a Nobel laureate who pioneered the application of economics to areas such as discrimination, crime and the family, his answers involved market mechanisms. Mr Becker argued that immigration was out of kilter because of the absence of a price that would match supply and demand. Governments, he suggested, could use economic principles to allocate visas, either by selling the right to migrate at a price that called forth a desired number of migrants, or by auctioning immigrant visas.

As with any price, one for immigration would allocate the ability to migrate to those who desired it most. Successful migrants, Mr Becker argued, would still be better off, even after paying a hefty fee for the privilege. But the receiving country would benefit, too. Adjusting the price from year to year would allow governments to retain control over how many immigrants came while responding to changing labour-market conditions. And the revenue raised might go some way to assuaging the concerns of those who oppose immigration, especially now when clever thinking is needed about ways to improve public finances. Charging $50,000 for the right to immigrate would net America $50 billion if it let in 1m immigrants, roughly as many as it currently admits legally.

This is a huge reason why I love Economics. It seems that the very basic principle of supply and demand can be applied to nearly any market situation, and the one of immigrants is no different.

The fact is, we do need the best and brightest in this country, generating tax revenue, and simply generating ideas for American-based companies. Protectionism never helped anyone, and if anything it is just going to drive more innovation and economic growth to India and China.

Gary Becker's proposed solution is brilliant, and allows free markets to dictate the value of living in a country. Auction models are one of the basic executions of free markets. If people are going to come in, why not generate revenue out of it?