Two pizzas at a meeting anyone?

Amazon’s Bezos uses pizza as a metric for choosing the size of his teams. Basically, if a team can’t be fed be two pizzas alone that team is too large. The brain can’t handle a lot of people, so it’s not a surprise that smaller teams tend to work better. They found that the larger the meeting group was, the more ineffective the meeting. Don’t believe me? Look at the stats below on what people typically do during meetings.

Whether you work at Amazon or another company, gathering together a massive squad for your meeting will probably just stifle creativity. In Fast Company, Rachel Gillett writes that “the idea of working within small teams is believed to help diminish various innovation killers like groupthink and social loafing.”

Other ingredients for a solid meeting include appointing a strong moderator, setting firm ground rules, and ensuring the discussion is relevant to all attendees beforehand. In addition, it always helps to manage expectations for meetings by circulating the agenda and outcomes required.

If you find independent ideas are suffering in your organization, it might be time to suggest instituting the two pizza rule. While the gist of Bezos’ rule is that less is more when it comes to meetings, you can also feel free to take his advice literally and bring two pizzas to your meetings every once and a while. Pizza makes everything better. And people will have no excuse to skip meetings or bail out early due to lunch!

Interesting reads:

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-productive-meetings-2017-7/?IR=T

https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2016/04/26/9-signs-that-youre-an-ambivert/#230ce8383145

http://lifehacker.com/5965280/follow-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-to-avoid-the-dangers-of-groupthink