They might say, the more, the merrier, but merriment isn’t exactly what you are looking for in an office environment. As we all know from our rather bitter experiences that productivity has an inverse relation with the number of people in the meeting; more people in a meeting, less productivity they show!
You often face difficulty to decide about the number of people in your group. This idea can be extended to any group like your study group or any project team. But how to decide what number is ‘too large’ or ‘too little’?
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has an interesting theory, which he calls the ‘two-pizza rule.” This suggests that you should never have a meeting or a team where two full sized pizzas are not able to feed the entire group. This means that your group should not be more than 8 to 10 people at most; the number of people that can be satisfied with two pizzas.
In fact, Bezos particular doesn’t like meetings, and only holds them when necessary.
“[Bezos] wanted a de-centralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink,” writes Richard Brandt at The Wall Street Journal.
The rule is still followed by almost every team at Amazon, with the team members ranging from 10-12 at most.
Of course, if your team consists of engineers, you will probably waste more time in deciding the dynamics of the rule than your actual project!
Are you going to try this rule in your next project team? Share your views in the comments’ section below.