Meetings going 'topless'

"One of my biggest frustrations when I was an engineer at Google was being summoned to an executive meeting only to find three-quarters of the executives too busy with their laptops. I'd spend hours preparing a summary of my project status, a briefing on a new strategy area, or a review of staffing assignments. As requested," Minar commented on Zawodny's blog. "Nothing communicates disrespect to your reports like ignoring them when they're with you."

Minar declined to be interviewed.

Urge to unplug

The folks at Dogster Inc., the San Francisco company that runs the sites Dogster.com and Catster.com, decided to cut the cord about a year ago. The decision was in keeping with their philosophy of creating a collaborative culture, co-founder John Vars said.

"Even if people are just taking notes, they are not giving the natural human signals that they are listening to the person who is speaking," he said. "It builds up resentment. It can become something that inhibits good teamwork."

Bottom line, Vars said: better, more efficient communication. "Meetings go quicker and there is also just a shared experience. People are communicating better, the flow is faster."

Not everyone feels the urge to unplug. Selina Lo doesn't mind if her employees multi-task in meetings. The energetic chief executive of Ruckus Wireless, a Sunnyvale-based Wi-Fi company, is a known workaholic. She flashes $50 bills at off-duty cab drivers and delivers clipped answers to complex questions to save time.

"Occasionally, if I see someone too absorbed reading e-mails, I will elbow them," Lo said. "People are going to get distracted. It's OK as long as it is not for an extended period of time. I get distracted myself. That's just how meetings are nowadays."

And that makes some people wonder if by focusing on gadgets and gimmicks, everyone's missing the real problem.

Minimized meetings

"People hate most meetings," Zawodny said. "No one teaches anyone to run them correctly. They become a source of frustration."

That frustration is so widespread that some start-ups cut meetings short or do away with them. Mountain View, Calif., Internet company Plaxo Inc. took a "meat ax" to meetings, moving them all to Tuesdays with the goal of making other days more productive. (They called it "Meataxo.") San Francisco e-mail start-up Xobni Corp. has been known to use a stopwatch to keep team updates under two minutes during daily lunch meetings.

Photo-sharing site SmugMug Inc. in Mountain View is an "anti-meeting" company, founder Don MacAskill said. "We have a single all-hands meeting once per week, and the emphasis is on getting it over fast. Each person is expected to answer the question 'What am I working on this week?' and is expressly forbidden to talk about what they did the week before, make announcements, ask questions, etc."

That sounds about right to Joe Lazarus, Yahoo's former director of marketing, who left in November to consult and start his own company. He weighed in on Zawodny's blog: "No laptop meetings make sense. No meetings make even more sense."

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jessica.guynn@latimes.com.