If you work in a more or less large company, you will surely have already suffered one of its endemic evils: meetings. Or rather, have many meetings. Steve Jobs was clear that they were a huge problem and Larry Page had a hard time solving it because yes, excessive meetings are not something new by any means, although with teleworking they skyrocketed for obvious reasons. And for Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, they are the symptom of a much worse problem within the company.
The key to having fewer meetings: manage tasks, not people
In fact, the co-founder of Airbnb is clear that this abundance of meetings is not an evil but a sign of aspects to improve within the corporation. To begin with, its size: “It is not because there are no Wednesday meetings. It is because there are too many people“, he said in a talk for Khosla Ventures.
The manager’s proposal involves employing a small, high-level workforce: “We want a small, agile, elite and highly qualified team, not a team of mid-range people. And the reason is that each person implies a communication tax.”
And he points out another problem that points directly to human resources: mediocre hiring. Basically, in Chesky’s ideology, when someone is not capable of doing a job, they hire people who do not know how to do it either and they also hire more people to carry it out in a kind of empire of incompetence. Each person pulls in a direction, so of course they have to meet to share their progress. And more bureaucracy.
In addition, he leads by example: he says that he completely eliminated the layers of management so that only people truly specialized in a certain task lead it: “You can only manage the function if you are an expert. You don’t manage people. You manage people through the work.”
In a nutshell: you manage tasks, not people. His inspiration: the legendary Jony Ive, now working closely with Sam Altman to build an AI device. Ive’s philosophy is to focus on work and form a team that designs together.
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Cover | Airbnb and Marcus Dawes via Wikimedia
