Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

And if you don’t recognize that, you get trapped. Like Google. Up until very recently, all 140,000 people at Google attended a 2–3 hour all-hands meeting every week—the famous (or infamous) TGIF meeting. TGIF is short for “Thank God it’s Friday” but it actually happened on Thursdays since Asia needed to attend (another example of something that doesn’t scale). Aside from a bit of banter from the execs, most of TGIF was dedicated to teams from across the company presenting their work. Sometimes the content was really interesting. Many times it wasn’t. But the purpose of the meeting—transmitting relevant information in an effective manner—was buried years ago. Most Googlers spent the entire three hours making memes about the meeting in an internal app called Memegen. And while that’s great for culture and a nice way of uniting the team, there’s no human on Earth who can claim it’s efficient or will help anyone do their job better. And it’s expensive. Even if you don’t factor in the cost of a large chunk of your company spending several hours a week making memes, there’s so much prep work involved. Google had a dedicated team for TGIF—dozens of people spent hundreds of hours on these weekly productions. So save the all-hands for when you really need them—make them special. Keep them regular but rare. And encourage smaller, inter-team groups to get together to share relevant information. They can even sit on the floor eating lemon bars. But the goals of the meetings should be ...