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IBM "Invents" 40-Minute Meetings

Posted by CmdrTaco on Fri May 08, 2009 05:23 PM
from the that's-a-great-idea dept.
Patents IBM
theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that self-described patent reform leader IBM wants a patent covering its System and Method for Enhancing Productivity. So what exactly have the four IBM inventors — including two Distinguished Engineers — come up with? In a nutshell, the invention consists of not permitting business meetings to be scheduled for a full hour during certain parts of the day. From the application: 'The observation is that if an hour were shorter, by a small amount, we would be more focused, and accomplish the same amount of work, but in less real time, thereby increasing productivity.'" I just knew someone would one up my 43-minute-meeting patent. That's why I've already begun intense R&D on my latest invention: the 37-minute meeting! Register early for an early-bird discount. Register even earlier for more of one.
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Submission: IBM 'Invents' 40-Minute Meetings by theodp (442580)
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  • I call 41 minute meetings. Nobody can have a meeting for 41 minutes because I already invented that.
    • I patented the 41 minute and 1 second meeting. You better make sure not to infringe my patent!

      • Re:Mine Mine (Score:5, Funny)

        by LaskoVortex (1153471) on Friday May 08 2009, @05:42PM (#27883215)
        I patented the non-meeting. All group communication is now done by text messaging or twitter. Productivity jumped 140%.

        • Re:Mine Mine (Score:5, Insightful)

          by crispin_bollocks (1144567) on Friday May 08 2009, @06:22PM (#27883527)
          My company is all about the non-meeting. It's not all you'd hope for, believe me. In general, having an agenda (rare thing in most companies) and someone to step through it (rarer) without trying to solve the world's problems can make meetings a thing that employees can handle without dreading boredom. No chairs, lots of whiteboards, and each victim standing in front of his/her own section is tremendously productive :-)

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by houghi (78078)

          I had almost the same idea. I just used facebook instead of text messaging and twitter. Productivity dropped by 140%.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by veganboyjosh (896761)
          Yeah, too much prior art, methinks.

          • Re:Mine Mine (Score:5, Insightful)

            by rackserverdeals (1503561) on Friday May 08 2009, @11:07PM (#27885281) Homepage Journal

            Don't despair, I think patents expire. We will look back at this time 200 years from now and wonder "what were we thinking!"

            Patents expire, but a lot of harm can be done until they do and IBM is no stranger to playing the patent extortion [forbes.com] game.

            The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.

            After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.

            An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

            After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.

            IBM even tried to patent the patent protection racket [slashdot.org].

            And whenever something about IBM and patents comes up someone giddy over how IBM fought SCO in court says something stupid like it's just a defensive patent. IBM has a long history of being offensive with patents [newsweek.com].

            IBM set the standard for patent licensing in the early '90s. While Big Blue was in a steep decline, veteran employee and lawyer Marshall Phelps got the company to raise the fees it charged others for piggybacking on its ubiquitous technology. Phelps recalls that incoming CEO Lou Gerstner was skeptical of the program; at RJR Nabisco, he had been involved in a patent dispute with Procter & Gamble over soft chocolate-chip cookies. Phelps changed Gerstner's mind by cracking open an IBM PC and showing him all the components that came from other companies. In other words: hardware companies were interdependent, and as the biggest fish in the sea, IBM should exploit that fact. A few years, later IBM was raking in $2 billion a year of almost pure profit from licensing revenue.

    • The Obvious... (Score:5, Informative)

      by pentalive (449155) on Friday May 08 2009, @06:23PM (#27883529) Journal

      No one yet seems to have mentioned a 42 minute meeting as the perfect time. (for any time over 0, zero minutes is more perfect)

    • is to expose by updating their wikipedia page, seriously, calmly, with proper references. That's what I'll be spending the next minutes on. See ya

        • Re:THE BEST way to fight this (Score:5, Informative)

          by psxndc (105904) on Saturday May 09 2009, @04:51AM (#27886985) Journal

          Congratulations on proving why Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information. IBM does not have a patent on a 40 minute meeting, they have a patent application that claims setting up a time template on a scheduling server (claim 1) that allows for using different time intervals (claim 3). If you actually look at the file history on the USPTO site, you'll see the patent office hasn't even picked the case up to examine it yet. But that would assume people on slashdot care about things like facts.

          The article quoted says "wants a patent", not "has a patent." The Slashdot editor then implied IBM had a patent. And what you did, seriously, is spread FUD because you took something you read on slashdot (but clearly don't know anything about) and posted it to a place people read and rely on as an accurate source of information. Pat yourself on the back. You spread misinformation today.

          Informative my ass.

  • And The Loser Is... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alain94040 (785132) * on Friday May 08 2009, @05:27PM (#27883091) Homepage

    The only way to fight this epidemy is for some geek group (slashdot, techcrunch, whoever) to hold an annual lemon patent award to the most stupid patents.

    Finally, engineers and companies may be scared of receiving this award, with the attached bad publicity, and may think twice before submitting blatently stupid patents.

    --
    can we do Libre without Free? FairSoftware

  • Stand in front of the whiteboard. Guaranteed shorter meetings

    ~kulakovich

  • "I just knew someone would one up my 43 minute mtg patent." ...Actually we just had a meeting right now, you and me.

  • IBM Says (Score:2, Informative)

    by st3v (805783)
    No! No, no, not 37! I said 40. Nobody's comin' up with 37. Who has a meeting in 37 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.

  • Back in the early nineties, I worked for a sprawling company that... now that I think of it, was eventually purchased by IBM... but anyway, early on it was recognized that getting to your next meeting on time, if it was across campus, bordered on impossible. It was collectively decided that meetings would end at ten minutes before the hour to allow travel time.

    But I guess stranger things have been patented.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DrLang21 (900992)
      In all the places I've worked, meeting time allotments are only somewhat honored. For the most part, the meetings always take as long as they need to. About the only thing that can prevent a meeting from going into over time when not everything has been covered is when the group can't find a room to move to when they get kicked out by the next scheduled meeting.

  • Seems resonable (Score:5, Funny)

    by nixdroid (1482893) on Friday May 08 2009, @05:51PM (#27883289)
    I'm pretty sure that IBM invented meetings, so why not?

  • Zero minute meeting (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Virtex (2914) on Friday May 08 2009, @05:51PM (#27883293) Homepage
    I generally prefer the 0 minute meetings. They're so short you don't even have to go. That way you can actually get real work done.

  • Bad summary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dachannien (617929) on Friday May 08 2009, @05:51PM (#27883297)

    Any Slashdot article that quotes from the abstract, background, or other parts of the disclosure of a patent application instead of the claims, which are the part of a patent application that actually counts, should automatically get tagged "badsummary".

    Oh, wait, that'd be all of them.

    • RTF Patent Application instead of ineffectually whining.
      It's hilarious!!!

      People paid real money to get that shit filed!!!!!

    • Re:Bad summary (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zordak (123132) on Friday May 08 2009, @07:13PM (#27883883) Homepage Journal
      I'm normally the first one up there with you saying all these rubes on /. are overreacting. But I read the claims, and they're actually WORSE than the summary. The first independent claim looks like "restricting meetings to a definite time." It doesn't even say 40 minutes. It's just a definite time restriction. Now granted, this claim won't be allowed, but ... wow.

      • Re:Bad summary (Score:5, Informative)

        by samkass (174571) on Friday May 08 2009, @10:30PM (#27885079) Homepage Journal

        Actually, that's not what it says. By my reading, the patent is actually reasonably innovative. At least, I've never heard of any calendaring system doing it as described.

        What the claims of the patent say, in essence, is that the day should be broken down into schedule-able blocks of differing sizes configured by a system administrator. So if you have a 40 minute meeting, you can reserve the 40-minute block during that day and not the 30 or 60 minute block. Instead, most people today would say, "Well, it's going to run longer than 30 minutes, so I'll reserve an hour." I actually think I'd love it if Outlook operated in the way described in the patent instead of making it easiest to reserve meetings on 30 minute boundaries.

  • I am incredulous at this patent. When you get to [49] you realize you've been reading bloviated shaggy dog joke. Could IBM have a few smartass Slashdotters working in Engineering? My last thought is some engineers in between projects needed to work on something and this was it.

  • Patent madness (Score:2, Interesting)

    by JSG (82708)

    IIRC (IANAL) a patent can be (in a simplistic sense) granted for a business process but is invalidated if "prior art" can be demonstrated. I also believe that an "obvious" invention is invalidated as a patent.

    How on earth does this even get accepted for inspection?

    Does this story even need debating? Is it conceivable that the patent will be granted? (in the US or anywhere else). This last question I'd love to be answered by someone who is an expert in this sort of thing.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by phantomfive (622387)
      Have you looked at the patent application? See if you can look at it for more than 10 minutes without screaming out in pain and horror. Would you want to have to read those things every day eight hours a day as your job? I sure wouldn't. I would take a significant pay cut to work in some other place. They would have to pay me $200k before I would consider working at that job. So what kind of people do you think end up inspecting patents? I feel sorry for them. It's not a job that should be inflicted

  • Silly (Score:3, Interesting)

    by eln (21727) on Friday May 08 2009, @05:54PM (#27883327) Homepage

    Scheduling a meeting for 40 minutes is useless, because the meeting will just end up going overtime by 20 minutes most of the time. The secret to a quick yet productive meeting is to have a well-prepared, well-organized moderator who is able to get to the pertinent facts quickly and cut down on extraneous chatter.

    Unfortunately, those people tend to be rare, at least in my experience. I can have a meeting that runs 20 minutes, and another that runs 90 minutes, and the 20 minute one will be more productive because the leader of that meeting is able to stay organized and keep control over the conversation.

    If you schedule a lot of meetings back to back that are each 40 minutes, they may all end at 40 minutes as people start to leave to get to the next meeting, but without the aforementioned leadership, they'll just be 20 minutes less effective than the hour-long meetings you used to have were.

  • Why do people think meetings must fill the allotted time? The start time is when you meet. The "end" time is the limit, after which you're free to have other engagements. But if you get everything accomplished early, why babble away for the remaining minutes?

    You can't demand productivity. If you're not being productive anymore, meeting over.

    Does anyone have meetings that actually operate like that? Do they work?

  • There is some value for the idea that business meetings can suffer simply because of the mechanics of how they are scheduled. Hour long meetings often are not optimal, workers will find ways to fill the time or not adequately address issues because of the artificial time restriction.
    Also, Participants tend to be more rigorous about the length of the meeting, and less about the length of subtopic discussions. Perhaps scheduling topics as "micro-meetings" will help maintain discipline.
    While not really to
  • IBM means "more and stupider".

  • Meeting time length really isn't the problem, usually meetings are a useless waste of time because they either don't need to exist in the first place or get pulled in new directions that serve no purpose.

    1. Define objectives
    This gives attendees something to prep and sets expectations.

    2. Be the Shepherd
    You must pipe up, directly and unceremoniously, when a meeting is becoming off track, record new meetings that must occur "offline" even if they aren't your own.

    3. Meeting must create a product
    The product coul

  • 'The observation is that if an hour were shorter, by a small amount, we would be more focused, and accomplish the same amount of work, but in less real time, thereby increasing productivity.'"

    [my emphasis]

    This could have only come from some PHB/MBA marketdroid.

    My bad! Maybe they are asking to be thrown into the event horizon of a black hole???

    We have sacrificed many things to achieve IP(Imaginary Property) as a viable 'business model', but trying to redefine physics to artificially 'manipulate' time is just too much for anyone with more than a shoe-size IQ!

    Or has Physical Sciences/Quantum Physics been redefined and subverted to become part of the MBA curriculum for PHB's?
    Solutions?
    In the time honored /. tradition, I propose:

    We need to exhume all of our deceased scientists, wrap them in wire, and re-bury them inside of a magnetic coil==end of 'free energy' problem.
    Damn, wrong format...correction:
    revised
    1. exhume and 'wire-wrap' all scientists, and re-bury inside of magnetic coil.
    2. connect 'wired scientists' to MBA curriclum
    3. ????
    4. Profit!!! with unlimited 'free energy!!!'

    This has to be the saddest thing I have seen in quite some time...for it to be entertainable enough to actually make it to the 'front page' of anywhere, including /., to link to it!

     

  • . . . "please submit your calenders to IBM, so they can check if you have used a patented method in your scheduling."

    ???

  • Read this "race to the 1 minute meeting" reminded me of this old joke...

    Every program has at least one bug.

    Every program can be reduced in size by at least on line.

    Therefore, every program can be reduced to a single line - which is a bug.

    --

    Every meeting is way to long
    Every meeting can be reduced by one minute
    Every meeting can be reduced by one minute - which is too long.

  • This is kinda ironic for IBM old timers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sprior (249994) on Friday May 08 2009, @08:46PM (#27884483) Homepage

    When I first started at IBM the company accounted for employee time in 1/10 hour (6 min) increments, so the IBM way would be for 36 or 42 minute meetings, 40 minutes is unthinkable!

  • Can apply this thinking elsewhere (Score:3, Funny)

    by bakes (87194) on Saturday May 09 2009, @02:36AM (#27886423) Journal

    The same thinking can be applied elsewhere - the first thing that comes to mind is television shows. A full 1 hour show sees me either dozing off or losing interest. If they could shorten the show to... I dunno... maybe 43-46 minutes, I would find it much easier to pay attention all the way through.

    Sure, they would have to cut out some of the current content, but I'm sure these clever television people could find a way to make that work.

  • I've worked for IBM for almost 25 years. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jonatha (204526) on Saturday May 09 2009, @05:15AM (#27887087)
    My first meeting should be finished sometime today.

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