The 'two pizza rule' is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' secret to productive meetings

pulse

June 6, 2017 8:30 PM

Jeff Bezos thinks large meetings are unproductive. That's why he has a "two pizza" rule.

On Friday, Amazon announced that it would purchase Whole Foods for $42 a share in an all-cash deal.

That puts Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at the helm of a company valued at $13.7 billion.

But Bezos is no stranger to running a tech giant. He regularly shares leadership insights, from how he decides which risks are worth taking to how to keeps from losing entire days to unnecessary meetings.

For the latter, he uses the "two pizza rule."

Bezos makes a point of steering clear of unnecessary meetings. When a meeting is absolutely unavoidable, though, he uses his rule to boost their productivity and usefulness.

It's simple. The more people you pack into the meeting, the less productive the meeting will likely be. The solution? Never have a meeting where two pizzas couldn't feed the entire group.

Gathering together a massive squad for your meeting will 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."

And as Business Insider's Rich Feloni reports, 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.

What's more, writing for Psychology Today, Dr. Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London, says that it always helps to manage expectations for meetings.

"Always plan and circulate an agenda before the meetings," he writes. "Get everyone to agree beforehand what the outcomes of the meeting are to be. Take charge of the agenda and the outcomes. Be clear why some are, and are not, on it. Give some idea of the length of the meeting."

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.

Vivian Giang contributed to a previous version of this article.

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