
Elon Musk Describes What Great Communication Looks Like - endswapper
https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/this-email-from-elon-musk-to-tesla-employees-descr.html
======
js2
The submitted link is re-reporting of the e-mail published by Inc and doesn't
add anything. The original reporting is:

[https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/this-email-from-elon-
musk-...](https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/this-email-from-elon-musk-to-
tesla-employees-descr.html)

In both cases however, the meat of the articles is the e-mail:

 _Subject: Communication Within Tesla

There are two schools of thought about how information should flow within
companies. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that
you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this
approach is that, while it serves to enhance the power of the manager, it
fails to serve the company.

Instead of a problem getting solved quickly, where a person in one dept talks
to a person in another dept and makes the right thing happen, people are
forced to talk to their manager who talks to their manager who talks to the
manager in the other dept who talks to someone on his team. Then the info has
to flow back the other way again. This is incredibly dumb. Any manager who
allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves
working at another company. No kidding.

Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what
they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole
company. You can talk to your manager's manager without his permission, you
can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to
anyone without anyone else's permission. Moreover, you should consider
yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens. The point here is
not random chitchat, but rather ensuring that we execute ultra-fast and well.
We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do
so with intelligence and agility.

One final point is that managers should work hard to ensure that they are not
creating silos within the company that create an us vs. them mentality or
impede communication in any way. This is unfortunately a natural tendency and
needs to be actively fought. How can it possibly help Tesla for depts to erect
barriers between themselves or see their success as relative within the
company instead of collective? We are all in the same boat. Always view
yourself as working for the good of the company and never your dept.

Thanks,

Elon _

~~~
dpatru
But see this article by Cal Newport which highlights how the Pullman Company
increased production by limiting communication.
[http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/06/21/an-early-20th-
century-...](http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/06/21/an-early-20th-century-
lesson-on-the-difference-between-convenience-and-value/)

It seems that unrestricted communication slows down companies more than it
speeds them up. Maybe at Tesla they already have ways to manage interruptions.
Elon specifically mentions email and managers. Email can be read at the
receiver's schedule. The part of the job of the manager is to protect the
workers from distraction. "Try to email the manager who can best solve the
problem." != "Feel free to interrupt anyone at any time."

~~~
Bartweiss
This seems like a major risk at companies with software departments.

The fastest way to solve a problem like "I need a report with all of this
data" or "I can't login to the system" is to ask a programmer or DBA
personally. But the _best_ way is to go through some kind of channel that
blocks simple requests at a managerial or IT level, so larger projects don't
slip under the weight of random requests.

The customer service model here is actually quite instructive. For someone
with a 'real' problem, talking to a T1 rep is a useless waste of time. But
customers still get routed through T1 because the alternative is eating up
scarce time with simple issues.

If I had to guess, a strategy like this works for Tesla because they've got a
culture that supports it (i.e. "find the simplest solution") and a highly
technical workforce. This looks like a serious case of a context-specific
solution.

~~~
ABCLAW
You're prematurely optimizing.

If someone is roadblocked and cannot work (login issues, etc) their problem
needs to be solved immediately.

If resolving that issue is causing the programmer or DBA themselves to become
roadblocked and slip behind on work, they themselves can communicate that too
many people are falling through the cracks to HR or whomever else is involved
and get the gears moving on a fix.

~~~
Bartweiss
Huh... I would have argued _not_ doing it the way I described was prematurely
optimizing. Specifically, it's about throwing 'processing speed' at a problem
before checking whether that actually speeds up the solution.

If someone is roadblocked on all their work, yeah, that should be solved
immediately. Even if it's less theoretically efficient than some customer
service system, it's necessary in terms of treating people with respect.

But if someone has a specific task blocked? I'm not at all convinced
escalating that to a programmer or DBA is a reasonable step one. Partly
because the problem might be simple, mostly because switching time causes real
inefficiencies.

Of course, I'm assuming competent systems here. If "IT" is an outsourced
department that just tells you how to plug things in, then yeah, everyone
should escalate past them quickly. But if IT is actually knowledgeable, devops
has sensible workflows, and so on, then I worry that out-of-band solutions are
faster on each individual issue, but end up net-negative on overall company
efficiency.

------
PeachPlum
Flat is hardly a Musk invention.

The full philosophy can be seen in Dan Pontefract's "Flat Army"

[http://www.danpontefract.com/the-book/](http://www.danpontefract.com/the-
book/)

~~~
dbcurtis
Thanks for the link. Looks like a good read.

I've always used a signal processing analogy for management communication.
"Managers are lossy, high trasport-delay, filters." Any time a manager is
between two people trying to transer information, there will be delay, and
there will be information dropped.

Now, sometimes, that is a huge benefit. Not everyone can know everything in
any organization of reasonable size, so there is benefit to having someone
summarize information from other areas that I need to be aware of, and
communicate only the bits that are relevant to me. OTOH, there are times when
the best way to accomplish a particular mission is to get the manager out of
the communication path so that the people with the expertise can communicate
directly, at full speed and full fidelity, and deliver a solution.

So to me the litmus test for a manager is: "Am I adding value by filtering
this information?" If no, then get out of the signal path.

~~~
PeachPlum
And let me re-assure, trained managers know this very well (I'm one). An org
needs a good mix of trained managers and managers who have been promoted from
non-management working together.

And just like good technicians (and practitioners in most disciplines), when
we're doing the best work, it hardly looks like we're doing anything at all -
which is hard to distinguish from managers who are hardly doing anything at
all!

------
Aron
This sounds basically like the 'high responsibility' culture at Netflix.
Unfortunately, I don't actually trust that Elon has good intuitions when it
comes to management and this particular email is abstract without enough
support such that I think he might have woken up another day and written the
exact opposite just as convincingly.

------
throw2016
You need an incredibly mature and 'sorted' workforce to make this work but
then expectations determine behavior and Elon Musk is setting rules right from
the top with clarity.

Its now up to everyone to step up to the new expectations with similar clarity
and simplicity rather than use it for personal ego games or validation,
political one upmanship and self righteousness.

This is unfortunately easier said than done since it seems to be a human
weakness to make any group more than 2 political.

------
1290cc
Watch how quickly your career comes to a standstill if you go around your
manager trying to resolve issues or push your ideas forward. CEO's may state
things like this but its usually just lip service.

I've seen one employee use our "whistle blower" hot line and he ended up being
fired and then had the company use their considerable legal resources to mire
his court claim until he ran out of money and his US visa expired. It was
disgusting to see.

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woodandsteel
One of the problems with managers in big organizations is they tend to be
people who started out at lower levels and got promoted because they are good
at politics and making higher-ups think they are better at what they are doing
than they really are.

And as such they are more interested in keeping those under them from
explaining to those above them how they, the managers, are screwing up, than
they are in really doing things right.

------
smithsmith
The company policy to speak to another department without managers approval
seems great in theory. The problem with this approach is that managers will
favor good ratings and promotions to those who take permission before speaking
with other departments. How to avoid this situation ?. Are there any links to
how tesla management is structured ?

------
westurner
" The world is flat! "*

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat)

Check out Thomas L. Friedman (@tomfriedman):
[https://twitter.com/tomfriedman](https://twitter.com/tomfriedman)

------
perseusprime11
I would not take much out of this besides everyone in a company should be able
to talk to each other.

