Time to distill another bloated (but good) BusinessWeek piece.

Marissa Mayer’s six keys to running successful meetings:

1. Set a firm agenda. Mayer requests a meeting agenda ahead of time that outlines what the participants want to discuss and the best way of using the allotted time.

2. Assign a note-taker. A Google meeting features a lot of displays. On one wall, a projector displays the presentation, while right next to it, another projector shows the transcription of the meeting. Yet another displays a 4-foot image of a ticking stopwatch. Always capture an official set of notes and send a copy to those who missed the meeting.

3. Carve out micro-meetings. Mayer’s shortest block of time her calendar permits is 30 minutes, so she sets aside micro-meetings lasting only five or 10 minutes within a larger block of time.

4. Hold office hours. Beginning at 4 p.m., for 90 minutes a day, Mayer holds office hours. Employees add their name to a board outside her office, and she sees them on a first-come, first-serve basis. During office hours, Mayer can get through up to 15 meetings, averaging seven minutes per person.

5. Discourage politics, use data. Make the approval process for projects a science. Google chooses designs on a clearly defined set of metrics and how well they perform against those metrics. Designs are chosen based on merit and evidence, not personal relationships. [Imagine that!]

6. Stick to the clock. To add a little pressure to keep meetings focused, Google gatherings often feature a giant timer projected 4 feet tall on the wall, counting down the minutes left for a particular meeting or topic.

These are all good, but I still like Michael Dell’s “no chairs allowed in meetings” idea best. Combine no chairs with a four foot tall countdown timer and things will really get done.

Back in March I wrote a post about RIMM’s after-hours action called RIMM Shot Nearly Impossible to Catch. Well yesterday it did it again except this time it went from $85 to $100 instead of from $72 to $87. One company offered me a free “Crackberry” but I refused knowing that it would further unleash the obsessive-compulsive geek in me. ;-)

Kind of a blah morning with slightly positive bias, a crummy blah afternoon with slightly negative bias, and then a blast of selling in the last hour. No doubt the last four trading days have been extremely frustrating for day traders.

DIVX has been active since its recent IPO and is worth keeping an eye on (for the time being anyway). Assuming Dummies didn’t get long above the third bar, a sweet little narrow range bar showed up three bars (45 minutes) later.

Crummy choppy action but dozens of interesting new highs to choose from.

RHAT blew up after-hours when they reported bad Q2 earnings. It’s easy to see what’s moving after-hours and look for low-risk spots to enter. Do any of you play after-hours action exclusively or know someone who does? It makes sense to me, but the 12-hour time difference makes it impossible for me to consider now.

Crummy action, but plenty of new highs to choose from while assembling the Notables list.

Empty Nesting / Successful Investing, by Billionaire Gross ($1,200,000,000 and counting)

Gross gives some typically Boomerish (i.e. deeply selfish) parenting advice and sings the praises of the front end of the yield curve:

The art of investing has been obvious for as long as there was money to invest. Identifying winning securities/scenarios, wagering appropriately according to risk/reward, and being able to meld mass/individual psychology into an evolving game plan are the likely keys to the kingdom.

Don’t forget that his monthly Investment Outlooks are written to help meld mass psychology into his evolving game plan, i.e. why is he touting the front end of the yield curve now?

Kind of a crummy, choppy day though look at who is the number one Notable New High — yes, it finally passed the May high.

These are the bits that stood out to me in Milton Glaser’s essay, Ten Things I Have Learned:

“The brain is … like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. It is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have … We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain … Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.”

…

“Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being right.”

…

“Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.”

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