Bring a six-pack to your next meeting - and others will carry your points home

In September, Anzu Partners opened its new office in Atlanta, alongside the announcement of our third venture fund. Atlanta is home to some of the world’s largest and most innovative companies – including 家得宝 , Delta Air Lines , Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. , 美国联合包裹服务 , Cox Enterprises , Genuine Parts Company , Georgia Pacific, and of course, 可口可乐公司 .?

Coca-Cola has laid claim to many innovations – including the "six-pack carrier" in 1923. Pabst Brewing Company introduced the six-pack concept for beer in the mid-1930s.

Whether cola or beer, the “six-pack” enabled two key goals: carrying and storage.

With a six-pack structure (including a "handle of invitation"), consumers could more easily take the bottles home. And, once at home, the structure made it easier to store in home refrigerators (which went into mass production around 1918).

The six-pack was the ideal size: carrying a single bottle had too little impact, and a case of twenty-four would be unwieldy.? And this “six-pack” logic extends to meetings as well – structuring points to be carried and stored.

Earlier in my career, I approached meetings perhaps more like I had box of Franzia wine – near-unlimited supply and uninterrupted flow. Even if temporarily satisfying, this approach proved unproductive (at best). Especially at board meetings, management teams simply cannot take home dozens of action items. And, from a practical standpoint, storing, tracking and following up on too many points is unwieldy.

Taking a view that you have only six cans of cola (or beer or worms) that you can open in any board meeting can be helpful when picking where to expend effort.

For board members, this approach shifts the logic from “can I open up this issue?” to “is this one of the top six issues that I need to open up?”

Research shows humans’ ability to productively process information wanes rapidly after six concepts. George Miller’s 1956 article for Psychological Review, the leading publication of the American Psychological Association , concluded that seven was the “magical” limit. In studies that required a subject to recall of up to five or six concepts, Miller found “subjects simply did not make errors.”

With October “board season” in full swing, and near-daily sessions over the coming weeks, I hope the logic of the “six-pack” helps you carry your points home.

FWIW,

Whitney

P.S. Special thanks to Henk Both , our Investment Director in Atlanta, who recently relocated to the city, and John S. Sears , who has been long serving as our vanguard there.