It takes a long time to come up with an old idea

Rob Long ponders the purpose of meetings that fail to come up with anything new.

This week, Google unveiled the new logo for the Google part of its business, which looks pretty much like the old logo, except they’ve used a different font. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images / AFP

I went to a meeting once, at a large American television network, to talk about a new comedy they were thinking about.

“We’ve had a lot of meetings about this,” the vice president of comedy development told me. “We’ve been brainstorming with the marketing department, the audience research people and the creative team, and we really think there’s a hit television show here.”

It was hugely flattering, of course, to be asked to write and produce this – no doubt – brilliant idea. After all, it was the product of dozens of meetings with top-level executives. How could it be anything other than a crowd-pleasing smash hit?

The executive then pitched the idea to me. It was, in fact, a pretty good idea. But it was also something that was already on the air, on that network, pretty much exactly. They had spent countless hours and enormous amounts of research time trying to develop a show that they already had. Surely that had occurred to one of the dozens of executives at some point during one of the dozens of meetings, right?

The vice president of comedy development looked at me blankly for a moment, then his eyes lit up. “Wow,” he said. “You’re right.”

The Inverse Law of Meetings states that the more meetings that are held to discuss a new idea or groundbreaking initiative, the more likely that idea or initiative will end up exactly like every other idea or initiative, neither new nor breaking any ground. The more people talk about something, in other words, the more they talk it into submission.

A radio producer I know was once given a plum assignment: his bosses told him to come up with a fresh take on a two-hour afternoon news programme. He was told to go off and rethink the entire genre, break the mould, confound expectations and startle the audience.

So he did what any smart, thoughtful creative person would do: he assembled a team of other smart, thoughtful creative people and they held a series of meetings over several months and ended up producing a two-hour afternoon news programme that resembled, in every meticulous detail, every other two-hour afternoon news programme on the radio.

His bosses, of course, were thrilled.

In a way, though, we expect this kind of zany inefficiency from creative and media-based businesses. People in the arts and entertainment, we’re told, are a little crazy to begin with, so it’s only natural that when they all get together in a room the crazy tends to cancel itself out.

But the Inverse Law of Meetings – which, I confess, I just made up myself, without having a series of meetings about it – applies across all industries and all professions.

Google, the vast and all-knowing internet search and advertising behemoth, has always prided itself on its maverick status as a corporation. Google employees have a lot of freedom to pursue interesting projects and chase down new businesses. The management style has always been – at least according to company lore – casual and on-the-fly. Google, we’ve been told, is not a “meeting” kind of company. At Google, they “do”.

A few weeks ago, though, Google announced a general restructuring of its businesses, which are vast and mildly disquieting if you're a fan of the Terminator movies. No longer will the company be called Google. That playful, fun name will only refer to a set of core businesses – the ones we all know about – and the rest of them will come under the larger umbrella of the big company that is now named Alphabet.

We all have our own personal ideas of what constitutes torture, but one of them, for me, would be having to sit in those (I’m certain) endless, airless, excruciatingly dull meetings while teams of executives from the old Google, along with some snappily-dressed marketing geniuses in expensive eyewear, tried to come up with the name Alphabet.

Think of the walls, covered in sticky paper, with possible names scrawled all over. Goog? AlphaGoog? Umbroogle? Kloogle? AllOogle? SkyNet? Mom?

(Those last two were probably the product of the professional "facilitator" reminding the group that "there are no wrong ideas", at which point someone pitched the name of the computer system in the Terminator series of films that gives rise to the robot wars, and someone else just said what everyone else was thinking.)

This week, Alphabet – neé Google – unveiled the new logo for the Google part of its business, which looks pretty much like the old logo, except they’ve used a different font. The letters don’t have the little curlicues on the tips and ends anymore – what font geeks call serifs.

The new logo is so much like the old logo, in fact, that it could only be the product of several thousands of hours of meetings. Had they truly wanted something new, they should have held only one meeting, probably on Google Chat.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood