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IBM "Invents" 40-Minute Meetings
theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that self-described patent reform leader IBM wants a patent covering its System and Method for Enhancing Productivity. So what exactly have the four IBM inventors — including two Distinguished Engineers — come up with? In a nutshell, the invention consists of not permitting business meetings to be scheduled for a full hour during certain parts of the day. From the application: 'The observation is that if an hour were shorter, by a small amount, we would be more focused, and accomplish the same amount of work, but in less real time, thereby increasing productivity.'" I just knew someone would one up my 43-minute-meeting patent. That's why I've already begun intense R&D on my latest invention: the 37-minute meeting! Register early for an early-bird discount. Register even earlier for more of one.
I call 41 minute meetings. Nobody can have a meeting for 41 minutes because I already invented that.
The only way to fight this epidemy is for some geek group (slashdot, techcrunch, whoever) to hold an annual lemon patent award to the most stupid patents.
Finally, engineers and companies may be scared of receiving this award, with the attached bad publicity, and may think twice before submitting blatently stupid patents.
--
can we do Libre without Free? FairSoftware
Stand in front of the whiteboard. Guaranteed shorter meetings
~kulakovich
"I just knew someone would one up my 43 minute mtg patent." ...Actually we just had a meeting right now, you and me.
Ave Molech Setting
No! No, no, not 37! I said 40. Nobody's comin' up with 37. Who has a meeting in 37 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Back in the early nineties, I worked for a sprawling company that... now that I think of it, was eventually purchased by IBM... but anyway, early on it was recognized that getting to your next meeting on time, if it was across campus, bordered on impossible. It was collectively decided that meetings would end at ten minutes before the hour to allow travel time.
But I guess stranger things have been patented.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If they can work in six-minute abs, I'm there...
I'm pretty sure that IBM invented meetings, so why not?
-- Consensus - 50% probability that the majority are wrong.
I generally prefer the 0 minute meetings. They're so short you don't even have to go. That way you can actually get real work done.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Any Slashdot article that quotes from the abstract, background, or other parts of the disclosure of a patent application instead of the claims, which are the part of a patent application that actually counts, should automatically get tagged "badsummary".
Oh, wait, that'd be all of them.
Have a seat, gentlemen. Muahahahaha.
Guaranteed your meetings will run no longer than 10 minutes max.
I am incredulous at this patent. When you get to [49] you realize you've been reading bloviated shaggy dog joke. Could IBM have a few smartass Slashdotters working in Engineering? My last thought is some engineers in between projects needed to work on something and this was it.
The only way to fight this epidemy
You have two problematic assumptions:
Frankly, your idea won't work, as nobody would care -- and I'd call it unimaginative to say there's no other way :-)
IIRC (IANAL) a patent can be (in a simplistic sense) granted for a business process but is invalidated if "prior art" can be demonstrated. I also believe that an "obvious" invention is invalidated as a patent.
How on earth does this even get accepted for inspection?
Does this story even need debating? Is it conceivable that the patent will be granted? (in the US or anywhere else). This last question I'd love to be answered by someone who is an expert in this sort of thing.
Scheduling a meeting for 40 minutes is useless, because the meeting will just end up going overtime by 20 minutes most of the time. The secret to a quick yet productive meeting is to have a well-prepared, well-organized moderator who is able to get to the pertinent facts quickly and cut down on extraneous chatter.
Unfortunately, those people tend to be rare, at least in my experience. I can have a meeting that runs 20 minutes, and another that runs 90 minutes, and the 20 minute one will be more productive because the leader of that meeting is able to stay organized and keep control over the conversation.
If you schedule a lot of meetings back to back that are each 40 minutes, they may all end at 40 minutes as people start to leave to get to the next meeting, but without the aforementioned leadership, they'll just be 20 minutes less effective than the hour-long meetings you used to have were.
Why do people think meetings must fill the allotted time? The start time is when you meet. The "end" time is the limit, after which you're free to have other engagements. But if you get everything accomplished early, why babble away for the remaining minutes?
You can't demand productivity. If you're not being productive anymore, meeting over.
Does anyone have meetings that actually operate like that? Do they work?
Instead of coming up with a way to increase productivity, coming up with a way to decrease meeting duration. Way to go boys.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
There is some value for the idea that business meetings can suffer simply because of the mechanics of how they are scheduled. Hour long meetings often are not optimal, workers will find ways to fill the time or not adequately address issues because of the artificial time restriction.
Also, Participants tend to be more rigorous about the length of the meeting, and less about the length of subtopic discussions. Perhaps scheduling topics as "micro-meetings" will help maintain discipline.
While not really to the level of patenting, there are important inights into how people work.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Sign me in for the lemon patent thing!!!1
Wow, I was originally going to criticize all the early commentators in this thread for not reading what was actually written in the patent application. But after reading it, I agree with all the jokes that were made here. The patent really just describes a user interface for specifying meeting lengths. I can't imagine that anyone at the USPTO actually read this. How embarassing.
IBM means "more and stupider".
Dog is my co-pilot.
Meeting time length really isn't the problem, usually meetings are a useless waste of time because they either don't need to exist in the first place or get pulled in new directions that serve no purpose.
1. Define objectives
This gives attendees something to prep and sets expectations.
2. Be the Shepherd
You must pipe up, directly and unceremoniously, when a meeting is becoming off track, record new meetings that must occur "offline" even if they aren't your own.
3. Meeting must create a product
The product could be a document, further communication, knowledge transfer, anything. If a meeting doesn't produce anything then it is a waste of time. Hopefully you defined the product when you set your objectives.
I think it's a good idea to keep minutes, but often this just doesn't happen, however if you keep your objectives handy while running the meeting you can check them off. If someone hijacks your meeting, or new information must be shared, document these new interactions. If new points take over the purpose of your meeting you have to run it again later (if needed). Get people used to the idea that taking a planned meeting off course results in more meetings (something people will consciously avoid creating).
The important thing is to encourage the share of information but ensure that the venue for that share is in a defined format people begin to know what to expect and see value and if they don't do they need to be involved at all is a question you will have to ask yourself.
These guidelines work fairly well for my team and generally get people talking before and after meetings which usually:
a). Keeps the meeting itself on track
b). Gets people talking to each other!
crazy dynamite monkey
Leisurely Sun morning nutsack scratch.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
'The observation is that if an hour were shorter, by a small amount, we would be more focused, and accomplish the same amount of work, but in less real time, thereby increasing productivity.'"
[my emphasis]
This could have only come from some PHB/MBA marketdroid.
My bad! Maybe they are asking to be thrown into the event horizon of a black hole???
We have sacrificed many things to achieve IP(Imaginary Property) as a viable 'business model', but trying to redefine physics to artificially 'manipulate' time is just too much for anyone with more than a shoe-size IQ!
Or has Physical Sciences/Quantum Physics been redefined and subverted to become part of the MBA curriculum for PHB's? /. tradition, I propose:
Solutions?
In the time honored
We need to exhume all of our deceased scientists, wrap them in wire, and re-bury them inside of a magnetic coil==end of 'free energy' problem.
Damn, wrong format...correction:
revised
1. exhume and 'wire-wrap' all scientists, and re-bury inside of magnetic coil.
2. connect 'wired scientists' to MBA curriclum
3. ????
4. Profit!!! with unlimited 'free energy!!!'
This has to be the saddest thing I have seen in quite some time...for it to be entertainable enough to actually make it to the 'front page' of anywhere, including /., to link to it!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
why the fuck is the slashdot front page an rss feed?
. . . "please submit your calenders to IBM, so they can check if you have used a patented method in your scheduling."
???
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Don't hold the meetings. Guaranteed shorter meetings.
Read this "race to the 1 minute meeting" reminded me of this old joke...
Every program has at least one bug.
Every program can be reduced in size by at least on line.
Therefore, every program can be reduced to a single line - which is a bug.
--
Every meeting is way to long
Every meeting can be reduced by one minute
Every meeting can be reduced by one minute - which is too long.
No one yet seems to have mentioned a 42 minute meeting as the perfect time. (for any time over 0, zero minutes is more perfect)
I agree, there's something incredibly fishy about the way the patent was written. It seems as if the writer was TRYING to be absurdly funny. I was seriously choking back laughter.
I call 0y0 minute meetings 4 times a day. After all my employees spend a minute looking at 0y0 they all just perk up, tension leaves the workplace with some tissues, and productivity continues.
How to do nothing and still think you're accomplishing something.
This is a sig. Deal with it.
To improve productivity at meetings all participants shall omit the use of articles(the, an, a) and conjunctions(and, or, but, etc) from their speech.
I am still researching a method for only using acronyms to communicate in meetings so we can compress many complex ideas down to 3 simple letters.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Dilbert said it. I believe it. That settles it.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
No...not six, I said seven. No one's coming up with six. Who works out is six minutes? You won't even get your heart going, not even a mouse on a wheel. Sevens the key number here. Think about it. Seven doors. Seven-Eleven. Seven. Seven little chipmunks twirling on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' of gorgonzola when it's clearly bree time baby. Step into my office...cuz you're fuckin' fired!
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the excercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
When I worked at the RI Sec State's office meetings were an inevitable waste of time. We utilized project management software, blogs, wiki's, intranet pages, full telecom systems, etc. But we still had mind numbingly boring meetings.
It got to the point where I'd arrange to be somewhere else when I knew a meeting was scheduled.
If there is one thing I absolutely abhor it is organizations where seat time matters.
I'll patent those chimps on typewriters and claim any and all potential derivative works.
My webcomic
The reason why that sort of stuff happens in companies like IBM is trivial:
You are rewarded (in actual $$$) for patents filed, and then again for patents accepted, plus there's a system of "grades" for inventors based on the number of patents that involves more rewards, and finally, promotions at high levels in the technical hierarchy are strongly influenced by how many patents are attached to your HR record.
That's as simple as it is.
As long as employees make $$$ or improve career opportunities in companies like IBM by stacking up patents (which don't even have to be actually approved by the USPTO), then such things will happen.
The 40 minute case is an example to describe functionality - not patent a specific case.
I worked for IBM for 10 years. The secret behind the 40 minute meeting is that ALL meetings start 20 minutes late. I can count on one hand the number of meetings in 10 years that started on time.
is to expose by updating their wikipedia page, seriously, calmly, with proper references. That's what I'll be spending the next minutes on. See ya
They're already only 40% American employees.
I believe that Cabletron had that rule 20 years ago, along with no chairs in the room (sitters were fired).
I mean our daily standup for scrums have gone from 15-minutes to 1/2 hr every day. (God how I hate scrum/agile development.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
My guess is that there must be some reward system in place. IBM claims to the GRAND title of having the most US patents EVAR!!!1!eleven!!! That's why I just happily update their wikipedia page.
Unfortunately, those people tend to be rare, at least in my experience.
They are! I worked for a firm that did a lot of government engineering. Our meetings lasted a maximum of 42 minutes (we had to account for all of our time in 6 minute increments) and any meeting with more than two other people required a meeting moderator. Since we only had a couple of meeting moderators for 3000 engineers we had few, but very productive meetings.
When I first started at IBM the company accounted for employee time in 1/10 hour (6 min) increments, so the IBM way would be for 36 or 42 minute meetings, 40 minutes is unthinkable!
See, I patented the effective and informative meeting! And I refuse to license it out to anyone!
That this causes tons of misery and non-productiveness is a great source of joy for me.
Yay! I can honestly claim a prior art: http://nothing-about-everything.blogspot.com/2006/10/cycle-of-time-may-reduce-effectiveness.html .
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
Yep, despite the image, IBM is as full as smartass programmers (and, of course, their pointy-haired nemeses, but no one doubted that) as any technology company. IBM (or a divison, anyway) is likely on one of its periodic pushes to come up with more patents, so a few smartasses came up with this one, and submitted it to their boss, who took them seriously (and didn't read through to 49). And since bonus money is likely involved, they're not going to let the boss in on the joke.
Ok in all seriousness, this is fucking retarded. I take this as IBM talking to the public like "Oh hey, look at us society, we may not have fancy cubicles like Google, but we aren't conformists like them because we have shorter meetings." SO let's say for instance, they are about to go bankrupt, and they need to come up with a strategy for conserving revenue and increasing profit... in the middle of John Doe's big important "this is how we save the company" idea, if it hits 41 minutes are they gonna "Sorry dude, outta time, oh well i guess we're fucked" No the fuck they aren't. The length of meetings has nothing to do with productivity. While yes, the approach to the meeting can effect it, a much more reasonable approach would be having all meetings be open-ended with slightly less structure. "We're IBM, we're new age and bad ass, meetings are for pussies" WTF
Here at IBM it is well known that it takes 20 minutes for everyone to join the e-meeting and/or track down the necessary "executives." So the 40 minute meeting just makes sure you use what's left.
I'm looking over the wall, and they're looking at me!
2:00 Meeting
3:00 Meeting
4:00 Meeting
5:00 BEATING
music lover since 1969
Everyone knows that meetings cause the abdominal muscles to tense up (as if to vomit) so perhaps this time-limit idea applies to ab exercises too. Let's see, 42 minutes in a meeting spread across 7 days each week (still need to do ab execises on the weekend)... Time to patent 6-minute abs.
I'm a genius! Nobody's thought of this before and it's certainly not mentioned in any movies I know of.
Doesn't this remind you of "7 Minute Abs" from "Something About Mary"?
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
In my little david vs goliath here, that's what I'm getting, and the page keeps being reverted. And here I'm thinking CowboyNeal is a reliable source...
In any case, if I lose, there are reliable sources for the "paper or plastic" patent, the "but I only had soup" patent, the offshoring patent, the "who is going to poo next" patent, the "terry is a boy, jeena is a girl" patent, etc. And here's a comment on IBM's patent schizophrenia. And here's another comment on how IBM makes money by destroying value.
I have nothing against IBM or other patent trolls, I just want them to look in the wikipedia mirror to see if they are happy with who they are. This will only stop with a big streisand.
that years ago. 200 buck 45 min. hours.
The Junior High School I attended in the 1970s (Bingham Junior High in Kansas City, MO) had "modular scheduling" in 20 minute increments, some classes were 20 minutes, some 60 minutes...and some 40 minutes.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
you are illegally using my patented invention of granting a discount for early purchase or registration.
The same thinking can be applied elsewhere - the first thing that comes to mind is television shows. A full 1 hour show sees me either dozing off or losing interest. If they could shorten the show to... I dunno... maybe 43-46 minutes, I would find it much easier to pay attention all the way through.
Sure, they would have to cut out some of the current content, but I'm sure these clever television people could find a way to make that work.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
off
6:00 Sleep
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
My first meeting should be finished sometime today.
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
The link gets you the claims if you want them. But claims are hard to grok. I'm writing up my own patent application right now, I have a good book to guide me, and I still can't quite make sense of how claims work. They can be confusing because they look like a list of dozens of things being claimed as inventions, when in fact some of the list items are combined with Boolean AND's. Plus, they're written so broadly that it takes a lot of imagination to realize what specific embodiments they have in mind.
The abstract and background are much better ways to get the gist of the patent across. Complaining that a patent should be described by claims alone is like complaining that software should be explained by source code alone and screenshots or descriptions are bad summaries.
If you can do it, why can't anybody else? Maybe the shorter schedule will help the meeting leader keep the other members on track. It's one thing to have the leader want to be productive and brief; it's another thing to have everybody else aware of the time constraint and putting pressure on any rambling talkers.
If the person who wrote your patent application was any good, you wouldn't have claimed just a 41:01 meeting. You would have claimed all durations other than an hour. And you could sue all the copycats using 40:00 and 41:00 meetings.
What IBM's application actually claims is the use of different meeting lengths at different times of the day and year. So it's not simply "40-minute meetings" but "40-minute meetings in the morning and 20-minute meetings near lunchtime and 90-minute meetings late in the afternoon". Or "120-minute meetings during the design stage of a project and 30-minute meetings near launch". And it doesn't cover manually scheduled meetings, just a computer system for automating the prescribed variations in scheduling.
Ok, the patent madness aside - yes, please.
My company, and probably almost every other company like it, is suffering tremendously from the stupid, idiotic, short-sighted, totally impractical meeting scheduling that's built into Outlook.
The simple fact that Outlook not only allows, but encourages you to plan a meeting on the 2nd floor from 9 to 10 and a meeting on the 6th floor from 10 to 11 - that fact alone guarantees that people will be late for the 2nd meeting.
A good meeting schedule - and everyone who's done his homework regarding productive meetings knows that - absolutely must include times for preparation, times for finishing up and time to transition between meetings, including a short stop at the desk to check if any urgent things have come up.
Here's what I think a useable meeting scheduler should work like:
* Know in rough outlines the distance (in minutes of travel) between meeting rooms
* Have in addition to "length of meeting" also "time for preparation" and "time after meeting" fields
* Never, ever, allow a 2nd meeting to start the same minute that a 1st meeting ends
For the past few years, I've been leading negotiations. For a short while, I've manually added 15 minutes before and after each negotiation round as briefing and debriefing times for my team. It worked great - we were always on time, together, for each negotiation round, and we could always sum up and report on the results.
Unfortunately, with the current tools available, it's a major hassle to do this, especially if you're also taking invitations from other people (who will book you right after another meeting).
So anything that automates this process, something as simple as automatic buffer times like mine above, would do wonders for productivity.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They pioneered this with Lotus Sametime - it takes 20 minutes worth of screwing with the software to get screen-sharing to work, automatically reducing an hour meeting to 40 minutes.
Back in 1973-74, I attended Jordanhill Teachers College outside of Glasgow, Scotland. During a 3-4 hour class/lab we were told that we could only hold people, and kids, attention for 20 minutes at a time. You need to have a break then.
At the end of the day. Having a meeting moderator that establishes a clear meeting agenda, prepare the necessary meeting fora, moves the meeting along and keep it on track is the key of the effective meeting. Otherwise, 40min meetings would just stretch into 1hr plus meetings that don't accomplish anything, just like regular 1 hr meetings
"The observation is that if an hour were shorter, by a small amount, we would be more focused, and accomplish the same amount of work, but in less real time, thereby increasing productivity."
According to http://www.physlink.com/Education/askexperts/ae283.cfm:
if your ship goes at 98% of the speed of light and you take a one year journey, when you return to Earth five years have gone by
An 'hour' can only be shortened if you move everyone but IBM employees closer to the speed of light. 1 Earth hour for an IBM employee will be 12 Earth minutes for everyone else travelling at 98% light speed.
At the end of the Earth day, when the Earth clock shows 5pm, everyone else will go home jet lagged, having worked only 1 hour and 36 minutes - *reducing* their productivity by a factor of 5. However, everyone else will also live 5 times longer than an IBM employee, which is why IBM replaces retired workers using the H1B and L1 programs.
"Old bag" has more than one meaning.