How to Fix a Broken Meeting

Business Week tells the story of Perry Klebahn, the man who's taken over as CEO of ailing bag company Timbuk2. He wanted to keep the 70 employees of the San Francisco company informed and engaged, but what he'd hoped would be an open forum for discussion turned into an awkward weekly event...

Klebahn was a graduate of Stanford's product design program and a part-time professor there since 1996. He's friends with two professors who were teaching a course about applying design principles to business processes or systems. The idea was to treat an organization as a prototype to be refined and improved. The professors -- Robert Sutton, an expert in organizational behavior and author of, most recently, The No Asshole Rule, and Debra Dunn, a 22-year veteran of Hewlett-Packard who held leadership positions in the marketing, manufacturing, and human resources divisions before moving to corporate HQ -- approached Klebahn about a short, Timbuk2-based project for the class and homed in on the meeting as the right-sized problem. It was, says Dunn, "small enough for students to wrap their arms around and large enough that it would make a significant impact. Meetings have tremendous symbolic power."

In February 2008 Sutton and Dunn took some students to observe a company meeting at Timbuk2. Most people in the meeting were standing or sitting on the floor. Sutton says, "The sun was glaring through the windows, forcing many to shield their eyes. You couldn't tell who was in charge. Some people were called on to give status reports didn't have anything to report... one person fell asleep. The meeting was broken."

Two weeks after the class had observed the meeting, Klebahn and his management team met with the students to hear their proposed solutions, most of which focused on giving employees more control and a greater sense of ownership of the meeting.

Click here for a complete list of the solutions the team developed for Timbuk2.