Return On Minute

This is a story about fairness. It was 2017, and I was working in the Office of the CEO at Microsoft managing the Senior Leadership team meetings. Satya and his leadership team of about 11 people at the time met every week for a full day of technical reviews, business, people and marketing discussions. Hordes of Corporate Vice Presidents, Vice Presidents, and petrified Product Managers would funnel in and out of the conference room every hour hoping that their one glorious moment in front of the counsel of king-makers would not end in failure.

Satya was (and I presume still is) a prep-guy. He always read the material that was being presented the night before. He wanted to be informed and thoughtful about his input the following day. Because of this, we always had the materials for the discussions 24-48 hours before for all of his 11 leaders to read.  There was an expectation that they would do the same.  However, it was known that many leaders did not pre-read the materials. They had their reasons and I’m not hear to judge them on their approach.

What I can say is that from my personal observations this made every presentation to the senior leadership team a wild ride for the presenters. Why? Because all the leaders in the room had different levels of understanding of the presentation. More often than not, Satya would want to jump ahead, while leaders that hadn’t read the material ahead of time wanted the walk through. Inevitably, discussion would go off course and presenters who had prepared more PowerPoint slides than your Aunt Millie’s trip to the Bahamas would leave feeling beaten by the process. Years of their collective life gone and for what?

Now at Amazon, I’ve been introduced to the reading culture.  I thought it was a myth. The thing of legend, where dragons, wizards and fairy’s roam. While not perfect, I have come to appreciate the reading culture that starts off many meetings. This approach evens the playing field. No one jumping ahead. No one falling behind. Also, there is little to no showmanship to distract from the core of the content. It’s all there in black and white.

Of course, there are draw backs, but no approach is perfect.  What this approach does do well is bring more equality into the system much like blind orchestra try-outs. So whether Amazon is more equitable than Microsoft, I’ll let you make up your own mind. What I do know is this that we could all use more equity in the world.

Image AI generated with Microsoft Designer.