Bill Simmons wrote something this past Friday which made me reflect. someone asked, “Can you tell me why it is necessary for all the networks to have like 12-20 people on their pregame shows?” and Simmons responds:
“You know how everyone always wonders why networks make so many bad decisions and ignore common sense so often? Well, the problem is every network has too many executives, and when you have a lot of executives, you have a lot of meetings, and if you have a lot of meetings, those same executives feel obligated to come up with ideas for those meetings just because they don’t want the head boss to say, “Gee, that was weird, Bob didn’t come up with a single idea in today’s meeting.”That leads to people feeling obligated to throw out bad ideas because a bad idea is better than not having ideas at all. And there are times when everyone in the room talks themselves into a bad idea — mainly because they couldn’t think of any other ideas — and once the bad idea springs into motion, everyone starts working on it and eventually talks themselves into the idea.”
I’ve never been a fan of large brainstorming meetings. The larger the meeting, the more likely I am to mentally disengage from it.I understand the “noble” goal of large meetings is to throw out all sorts of crap and see what sticks and hope that whatever’s out on the table will inspire others to build upon it. Because simple arithmetic would tell you that the more smart people you have in a room, the smarter the room collectively gets. However, this rarely happens. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’ve never seen it happen. Like Bill Simmons so comically describes above, I’ve seen bad ideas turn into terrible ideas, I’ve seen good ideas turn into ok ideas but I’ve never seen good ideas turn into great ideas.My perspective is that great ideas never come from large meetings, because great ideas require continuous iteration and dialogue that you just can’t get in a large meeting. I do believe that good ideas can can result from these meetings, because good ideas can be conceived independently and be acknowledged as such. But then a lot of the struggle comes in fighting to keep the good idea, good, and not hodge-podged with any bad ideas. Ultimately, it ends up being counterproductive and fairly frustrating.Everything great has been born out of the vision and work kickstarted by a couple or a few people. I’m making that statement without any facts to back it up. I can, because I feel like it. But for name-dropping sake I’m going to throw out Google, Microsoft and Batman. Occasionally, greatness might be born from one genius, but for the rest of us, we usually require some help. I’m not sure if I’m in the minority on this, but I don’t know why more people/companies haven’t realized and acted upon this. My guess is that it’s mostly a logistics and politics thing.
