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You could call this literate management :-). Not sure how this works for some purposes though, do audit / risk people make important decisions on docs they have

You could call this literate management :-). Not sure how this works for some purposes though, do audit / risk people make important decisions on docs they have just read? The ritualistic sounding silence of the first half of the meeting could probably eliminated with an automated document distribution system that does not allow you to participate in a meeting unless you've scrolled through the docs for sufficient time within a few days prior (a bit like those license aggreement buttons at the end of oracle's java downloads)

kator 5y ago
Jeff has talked about this in public, "good executives will cheat, they're busy they won't take the time to pre-read". I have found some leaders I can do "off line" with, but in general it's because their calendar and mine just don't overlap properly for a couple weeks and I want them to give me feedback earlier. I've been at Amazon 3 years, 6 months, and 7 days (thanks phonetool). In that time I've only seen a couple pre-read meetings, and a couple "offline review" (still in your calendar). Most of the pre-read meetings are less effective, they usually happen because of calendar pressure and the need for rapid decision on a topic. The one thing I don't like about WFH is that we sometimes "lose" people, they come to the meeting but float off into email, chat or whatever. When I first started we'd have 20 people in a room, laptops closed, reading, you could hear a pin drop. And usually I knew it was time to start the discussion because people looked up from their doc to see if others were done. I miss these meetings because the focus was amazing. To have all these people who I really respect read my doc and give me their 100% undivided attention is awesome. The nice thing about WFH is sometimes we spawn a bit of related topic in the chat, however it can be really hard to keep the debate going while the chat runs across a different thread but related to the overall topic.

kator 5y ago

Jeff has talked about this in public, "good executives will cheat, they're busy they won't take the time to pre-read". I have found some leaders I can do "off line" with, but in general it's because their calendar and mine just don't overlap properly for a couple weeks and I want them to give me feedback earlier. I've been at Amazon 3 years, 6 months, and 7 days (thanks phonetool). In that time I've only seen a couple pre-read meetings, and a couple "offline review" (still in your calendar). Most of the pre-read meetings are less effective, they usually happen because of calendar pressure and the need for rapid decision on a topic. The one thing I don't like about WFH is that we sometimes "lose" people, they come to the meeting but float off into email, chat or whatever. When I first started we'd have 20 people in a room, laptops closed, reading, you could hear a pin drop. And usually I knew it was time to start the discussion because people looked up from their doc to see if others were done. I miss these meetings because the focus was amazing. To have all these people who I really respect read my doc and give me their 100% undivided attention is awesome. The nice thing about WFH is sometimes we spawn a bit of related topic in the chat, however it can be really hard to keep the debate going while the chat runs across a different thread but related to the overall topic.