Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

In 2011, Larry Page became CEO of Google and tried to fix meetings. But his new policies were no match for Google Calendar pedants.

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 to the bathroom, grab a snack, etc. During a Q/A on the changes¹, someone asked him whether Google Calendar should default to 25 and 50 minutes for meeting lengths instead of 30 and 60 minutes. Larry Page said “yes.” And then someone on the Google Calendar team implemented this.

And then nothing changed. When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not! Meetings continue until the participants of the next meeting are clawing on your door like a pack of zombies.

At one point, one team in the NYC office noticed that their standups were about 10 minutes long. They didn’t want to compete with meetings that respected the half-hour boundaries. And why would they need to? Every meeting room had free slots at the last 10 minutes of every hour because people were now booking 50-minute meetings. So they did what any rational engineering team would do: they started booking their standup in the tiny 10-minute time slices that were free on the calendar of every meeting room.

I found this out when I saw them knock on the door to a meeting room by my desk. 2:50 rolls around and someone knocks on the door and says “I have the meeting room.”

The person in the room responds, “No you don’t, it’s 2:50.”

“Look again at the room’s calendar. You booked a 50-minute meeting, we have the room for the last 10 minutes of the hour for our standup.”

I could hear the muffled exasperation. “You’ve got to be joking me.”

“We have the room, sorry.”

Then everyone shuffled out of the room, looking vaguely pissed off. And who could blame them! Can you imagine if someone actually held you to this policy? You’re there stammering “it’s the default, I meant for the room to be ours for an hour” and they counter with the fact that their names are listed as the active participant? I mean, I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room, but surely it worked a lot?

I wish I knew the identities of these brave meeting crashers. I saw them pull this stunt twice and then ride off into the sunset, and I never got to learn what team they were on. I wish I knew their motivations. Were they true believers in the 50-minute policy? Were they bored pedants? Were they wraiths, cursed to hunt the office for available meeting rooms? I’ll never know for sure.

1. Likely at a TGIF, but truthfully I don’t remember.