Silicon Valley Meetings Go Topless

Like so many innovations from the home of hi-tech, the latest movement in Silicon Valley is counterintuitive: ditch those computers.

A growing number of companies in the Californian region that is home to Google, Yahoo, Apple and Cisco are urging employees to leave laptops on their desks when attending office meetings and engage in the decidedly low-tech form of social networking known as human interaction.

Naturally, there's even a snappy term for the move: topless meetings. "Face-to-face meetings have become a low priority because they're constantly interrupted by technology, and people can't figure out what to do," Sue Fox, author of Business Etiquette for Dummies, told the Los Angeles Times. "What's more important - the gadget or the people you're with?"

"Even if people are just taking notes, they are not giving the natural human signals that they are listening to the person speaking," John Vars, co-founder of Dogster.com, said. "It inhibits teamwork."

Get rid of the gadgets, however, and, "meetings go quicker and there is also just a shared experience. People are communicating better, the flow is faster."

For some, though, the problem lies not with the technology brought into office meetings, but with the meetings themselves. "People hate most meetings," technology blogger Jeremy Zawodny wrote. "They become a source of frustration."

That frustration has led to yet another innovation: meeting-free companies. That too has a snappy moniker: "meataxo", as in take a meat axe to meetings. "No-laptop meetings make sense," Zawodny blogged. "No meetings makes more sense."