6 ms·

An email from Elon Musk to employees: “Communication Within Tesla”

96 points by tdurden 9y ago

CADTroy 9y ago
I am definitely in favour of the notion of avoiding "management silos" but I would echo the sentiment left at the end that it seems to be much easier said than done in practice. "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." I imagine someone in such a high position would then receive an influx of e-mails to the point where it is counter productive as they cannot address each one on top of the already ~100 hours of work? I have never worked in an organization where this was the explicit rule established by the leader but maybe someone can shed some light on whether this practice has worked for them, or the challenges that comes with it?
- hacker_9 9y ago
  Just because he receives emails doesn't mean he'll answer them all. He probably tries to fill some quota of 10 emails a day or something, then moves on to other things. As an employee, you would hopefully have the common sense to not email him about trivial matters anyway.
- nicktelford 9y ago
  I think you've missed the main point of this rule. The rule enables you to communicate across the hierarchy, instead of having to traverse it. For example: you can work directly with someone at the same level as you in another department without having to traverse the hierarchy. This is actually the opposite of the problem you highlight, as traversing the hierarchy often creates choke-points in senior management as they have to co-ordinate everything going through them. Of course, it's good to keep management informed of important issues, but that's what the CC line is for!
- fnordsensei 9y ago
  With one exception, I have only worked in companies where this has been the norm. It's never been an explicit rule. It seems to me that it happens naturally unless culture is built to prevent it. The fact Elon decided to send an email might be an indication that one or more people implicitly or explicitly have punished others for communicating.
- pedroaraujo 9y ago
  I think he is expecting people to have some critical thinking to not starting to send emails to a VP just for the sake of sending emails to a VP. Let's say you are implementing the UI for the car's dashboard and you think it would be super cool to have the color of the cars' model in the UI matching the exact color the customer chose for the car. Maybe you could cut all the middle points of communication and directly email the guys that handle the paint job to know the exact color values that they use to paint the car. Of course that you wouldn't email Elon himself to do this, it would be pointless.
- nkoren 9y ago
  Almost a decade ago, I invited Elon to speak at a conference I was helping to organise at Oxford. Would've been very on-topic for him, but he declined with a pithy one-line reply. Was a solid enough opportunity that it was probably worth wasting a minute of his time. Had I come to him with something more trivial, I suspect the response would have been pithier and less polite. The impression I've gotten is that Elon likes to work with smart people, and that part of being smart is being able to make good calls about when to escalate something and to whom. Escalating an issue too high (or too low) is probably not a mistake one gets to make very often. It would be impossible to impose a discipline like this on a bunch of worker-drones. But amongst reasonably intelligent people, with honest leadership at the top levels, it seems achievable.
  - CADTroy 9y ago
    Yes I agree, after thinking about it a bit more and reading all of the responses I get the impression that this model works best if you are hiring people who are capable to make these judgement calls, and those who can't will likely not last very long within the company
- trevyn 9y ago
  This is easy for the people in high positions -- the vast majority of these types of emails are simply forwarded to the appropriate underling, with only the implicit comment "please handle this". Many senior managers are little more than human message routers.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tchaffee 9y ago
  The other rule that helps with this is to train employees to always put the conclusion at the top of the email. And it should fit in a short sentence. Give me the bottom line first and I can get through a lot of emails. I very rarely need all the details someone thinks are important in order to make a decision.
hacker_9 9y ago
"Musk works about 100 hours per week at the electric carmaker" 7 / 100 = 14.3 hours a day. Or 100 / 5 = 20 hours a day. Does he not require food then? Or any non-work activities? Talk about hyperbole.
- neverminder 9y ago
  So then how many hours does he spend with SpaceX?
  - dozzie 9y ago
    Another 80 per week. He just works quite long weeks.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      With 168 hours per week that would require some rather advanced magic.
      - dozzie 9y ago
        Or a company called Wells that produces time machines, like Tesla produces cars and batteries.
      - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
        The Boring Company's real goal is to drill a black hole so Musk can work from a time dilation singularity.
  - lampenrad 9y ago
    Close to another 100!: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/elon-musk-goals/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/elon-musk-goals/ The proportion of time Musk devotes to each company is derived from a description he gave at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in June 2017. "The Boring Company is maybe 2 percent of my time, Neuralink 3-5 percent, Open AI another couple percent,” Musk said. The rest is split almost evenly between Tesla and SpaceX, he said, but “slightly more Tesla—it’s like a drama magnet."
joshribakoff 9y ago
I got "in trouble" at this one company for just doing my job. I walked onto the sales floor and asked a sales person if I can silently watch over their shoulder so I can learn about how the companies CRM was used. The sales manager felt I infringed on her team and complained to the lead programmer who in turn begrudgingly "warned" me not to do that ever again. I think I lasted like another 6 weeks there before putting in notice and leaving to a smaller company. All I wanted to do was identify ways to improve the crm, which was part of my job. But the team who made the software had no access to the team using the software
- Jazcash 9y ago
  As good as your past intentions sound, if somebody I didn't know from another department just came and sat next to me to watch me work, without me knowing it would happen beforehand, I'd put in a complaint too.
  - rwallace 9y ago
    He didn't do that. He asked permission to do it. It takes a particularly shitty mindset to respond to that by sneaking around behind someone's back and complaining to his boss.
    - jpatokal 9y ago
      Note that he asked a random salesperson for permission, and it was the salesperson's manager who reported him.
      - mannykannot 9y ago
        The manager's response is the sort of thing that would lead to him "working for a different company", according to the doctrine set out in Musk's email.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - 9y ago
dingo_bat 9y ago
> 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. Is this common at a lot of companies? I've only worked in one company and despite its many flaws I've never hesitated to contact the relevant person directly for anything, regardless of hierarchy and geography. I do make sure to keep my manager in the loop for anything that will take up a significant portion of my time. So he knows I'm not slacking off :P
- losteverything 9y ago
  <Is this common at a lot of companies? Everyone I've been in: Fortune 5, small biz, govt monopoly, r&d lab, retail One example: a legal department vs. Sales&marketing. Legal believes they can veto marketing decisions. A fuzzy plan to use CPMI was initiated by marketing. Legal said "you must stop" Marketing said "buzz off, you Legal, are in the 'advice' business. We exercise our right to ignore it." Several members in sales marketing kept in close contact with legal... Before and after... And were quickly transferred. Btw, the decision went to the BofD who naturally gave no reason to stop.
Vinnl 9y ago
One other Musk policy that sounded really well (I haven't experienced it actually implemented yet, but I try to keep myself to it) is to avoid non-common acronyms: https://twitter.com/davejohnson/status/602951117413216256 https://twitter.com/davejohnson/status/602951117413216256 Starting at a company and having to come to grasp with tens of acronyms before even knowing what the thing they stand for does seriously harms your ramp-up speed, I think.
- danpalmer 9y ago
  We've suffered a little from this and therefore put a lot of effort into stopping and using full terms, with all team members responsible for calling out use of acronyms. Anecdotally, seeing new team members being onboarded before and after the push, I think it's making a solid difference.
- dkersten 9y ago
  I often wish people would avoid most acronyms completely, especially in online discussions. Sure, you assume I know what some acronym means and it may be incredibly obvious to you, but especially when there’s a global audience, it can be very hard and not all acronyms are easily googled (looking at you, gaming community and game name abbreviations...) I think its fine to use acronyms in a document if you always write it out fully the first timem or, better yet, have a glossary of acronyms used.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  Yep. It's particularly bad at NASA; when I started there the first thing I did was to start compiling a glossary, because emails (etc) were full of so many acronyms that might be defined in many different documents. Maybe they've gotten better -- Emily Lakdawalla posted the other day a photo labeling Mars rover parts like "secondary thwack arm" and "rabbit hole". If you give things short vivid names you'll be less tempted to acronym them.
lazyjones 9y ago
Perhaps I just fail to see the stroke of genius in that policy, or it works better in car companies than web publishers, but as CEO I actively fought this kind of communication wherever it proved harmful. For example, the sales & marketing department got in touch with the IT and content departments directly on occasion in order to circumvent strict policies on usability and fairness vs. paying clients (i.e. they wanted special treatment for some customers when they bought expensive ads). Also, the IT folks complained that they couldn't keep their schedules because other departments kept asking for small favours that delayed their projects. Sure, you can always fire the people responsible for harming the company this way and hope everyone always shares exactly the same goals and values, but it doesn't seem very practical to me when there are (naturally) slightly conflicting interests within the company.
- DenisM 9y ago
  At this point you are using policies and procedures to fix misalignment of goals. Seems like something has gone wrong way earlier? I am trying to keep sales and support directly plugged into engineering, with latter being responsible for establishing, policing, and communicating proper scope. It educates sales of what's possible, but also educates engineering of the real-world impact of their action and inaction. We're a still a small company though, I don't know if I can keep it that way.
sctb 9y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149238

96 points by tdurden 9y ago

I am definitely in favour of the notion of avoiding "management silos" but I would echo the sentiment left at the end that it seems to be much easier said than done in practice. "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." I imagine someone in such a high position would then receive an influx of e-mails to the point where it is counter productive as they cannot address each one on top of the already ~100 hours of work? I have never worked in an organization where this was the explicit rule established by the leader but maybe someone can shed some light on whether this practice has worked for them, or the challenges that comes with it?

hacker_9 9y ago
Just because he receives emails doesn't mean he'll answer them all. He probably tries to fill some quota of 10 emails a day or something, then moves on to other things. As an employee, you would hopefully have the common sense to not email him about trivial matters anyway.
nicktelford 9y ago
I think you've missed the main point of this rule. The rule enables you to communicate across the hierarchy, instead of having to traverse it. For example: you can work directly with someone at the same level as you in another department without having to traverse the hierarchy. This is actually the opposite of the problem you highlight, as traversing the hierarchy often creates choke-points in senior management as they have to co-ordinate everything going through them. Of course, it's good to keep management informed of important issues, but that's what the CC line is for!
fnordsensei 9y ago
With one exception, I have only worked in companies where this has been the norm. It's never been an explicit rule. It seems to me that it happens naturally unless culture is built to prevent it. The fact Elon decided to send an email might be an indication that one or more people implicitly or explicitly have punished others for communicating.
pedroaraujo 9y ago
I think he is expecting people to have some critical thinking to not starting to send emails to a VP just for the sake of sending emails to a VP. Let's say you are implementing the UI for the car's dashboard and you think it would be super cool to have the color of the cars' model in the UI matching the exact color the customer chose for the car. Maybe you could cut all the middle points of communication and directly email the guys that handle the paint job to know the exact color values that they use to paint the car. Of course that you wouldn't email Elon himself to do this, it would be pointless.
nkoren 9y ago
Almost a decade ago, I invited Elon to speak at a conference I was helping to organise at Oxford. Would've been very on-topic for him, but he declined with a pithy one-line reply. Was a solid enough opportunity that it was probably worth wasting a minute of his time. Had I come to him with something more trivial, I suspect the response would have been pithier and less polite. The impression I've gotten is that Elon likes to work with smart people, and that part of being smart is being able to make good calls about when to escalate something and to whom. Escalating an issue too high (or too low) is probably not a mistake one gets to make very often. It would be impossible to impose a discipline like this on a bunch of worker-drones. But amongst reasonably intelligent people, with honest leadership at the top levels, it seems achievable.
- CADTroy 9y ago
  Yes I agree, after thinking about it a bit more and reading all of the responses I get the impression that this model works best if you are hiring people who are capable to make these judgement calls, and those who can't will likely not last very long within the company
trevyn 9y ago
This is easy for the people in high positions -- the vast majority of these types of emails are simply forwarded to the appropriate underling, with only the implicit comment "please handle this". Many senior managers are little more than human message routers.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tchaffee 9y ago
The other rule that helps with this is to train employees to always put the conclusion at the top of the email. And it should fit in a short sentence. Give me the bottom line first and I can get through a lot of emails. I very rarely need all the details someone thinks are important in order to make a decision.

hacker_9 9y ago

"Musk works about 100 hours per week at the electric carmaker" 7 / 100 = 14.3 hours a day. Or 100 / 5 = 20 hours a day. Does he not require food then? Or any non-work activities? Talk about hyperbole.

neverminder 9y ago
So then how many hours does he spend with SpaceX?
- dozzie 9y ago
  Another 80 per week. He just works quite long weeks.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    With 168 hours per week that would require some rather advanced magic.
    - dozzie 9y ago
      Or a company called Wells that produces time machines, like Tesla produces cars and batteries.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      The Boring Company's real goal is to drill a black hole so Musk can work from a time dilation singularity.
- lampenrad 9y ago
  Close to another 100!: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/elon-musk-goals/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/elon-musk-goals/ The proportion of time Musk devotes to each company is derived from a description he gave at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in June 2017. "The Boring Company is maybe 2 percent of my time, Neuralink 3-5 percent, Open AI another couple percent,” Musk said. The rest is split almost evenly between Tesla and SpaceX, he said, but “slightly more Tesla—it’s like a drama magnet."

joshribakoff 9y ago

I got "in trouble" at this one company for just doing my job. I walked onto the sales floor and asked a sales person if I can silently watch over their shoulder so I can learn about how the companies CRM was used. The sales manager felt I infringed on her team and complained to the lead programmer who in turn begrudgingly "warned" me not to do that ever again. I think I lasted like another 6 weeks there before putting in notice and leaving to a smaller company. All I wanted to do was identify ways to improve the crm, which was part of my job. But the team who made the software had no access to the team using the software

Jazcash 9y ago
As good as your past intentions sound, if somebody I didn't know from another department just came and sat next to me to watch me work, without me knowing it would happen beforehand, I'd put in a complaint too.
- rwallace 9y ago
  He didn't do that. He asked permission to do it. It takes a particularly shitty mindset to respond to that by sneaking around behind someone's back and complaining to his boss.
  - jpatokal 9y ago
    Note that he asked a random salesperson for permission, and it was the salesperson's manager who reported him.
    - mannykannot 9y ago
      The manager's response is the sort of thing that would lead to him "working for a different company", according to the doctrine set out in Musk's email.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- 9y ago

dingo_bat 9y ago

> 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. Is this common at a lot of companies? I've only worked in one company and despite its many flaws I've never hesitated to contact the relevant person directly for anything, regardless of hierarchy and geography. I do make sure to keep my manager in the loop for anything that will take up a significant portion of my time. So he knows I'm not slacking off :P

losteverything 9y ago
<Is this common at a lot of companies? Everyone I've been in: Fortune 5, small biz, govt monopoly, r&d lab, retail One example: a legal department vs. Sales&marketing. Legal believes they can veto marketing decisions. A fuzzy plan to use CPMI was initiated by marketing. Legal said "you must stop" Marketing said "buzz off, you Legal, are in the 'advice' business. We exercise our right to ignore it." Several members in sales marketing kept in close contact with legal... Before and after... And were quickly transferred. Btw, the decision went to the BofD who naturally gave no reason to stop.

Vinnl 9y ago

One other Musk policy that sounded really well (I haven't experienced it actually implemented yet, but I try to keep myself to it) is to avoid non-common acronyms: https://twitter.com/davejohnson/status/602951117413216256 https://twitter.com/davejohnson/status/602951117413216256 Starting at a company and having to come to grasp with tens of acronyms before even knowing what the thing they stand for does seriously harms your ramp-up speed, I think.

danpalmer 9y ago
We've suffered a little from this and therefore put a lot of effort into stopping and using full terms, with all team members responsible for calling out use of acronyms. Anecdotally, seeing new team members being onboarded before and after the push, I think it's making a solid difference.
dkersten 9y ago
I often wish people would avoid most acronyms completely, especially in online discussions. Sure, you assume I know what some acronym means and it may be incredibly obvious to you, but especially when there’s a global audience, it can be very hard and not all acronyms are easily googled (looking at you, gaming community and game name abbreviations...) I think its fine to use acronyms in a document if you always write it out fully the first timem or, better yet, have a glossary of acronyms used.
abecedarius 9y ago
Yep. It's particularly bad at NASA; when I started there the first thing I did was to start compiling a glossary, because emails (etc) were full of so many acronyms that might be defined in many different documents. Maybe they've gotten better -- Emily Lakdawalla posted the other day a photo labeling Mars rover parts like "secondary thwack arm" and "rabbit hole". If you give things short vivid names you'll be less tempted to acronym them.

lazyjones 9y ago

Perhaps I just fail to see the stroke of genius in that policy, or it works better in car companies than web publishers, but as CEO I actively fought this kind of communication wherever it proved harmful. For example, the sales & marketing department got in touch with the IT and content departments directly on occasion in order to circumvent strict policies on usability and fairness vs. paying clients (i.e. they wanted special treatment for some customers when they bought expensive ads). Also, the IT folks complained that they couldn't keep their schedules because other departments kept asking for small favours that delayed their projects. Sure, you can always fire the people responsible for harming the company this way and hope everyone always shares exactly the same goals and values, but it doesn't seem very practical to me when there are (naturally) slightly conflicting interests within the company.

DenisM 9y ago
At this point you are using policies and procedures to fix misalignment of goals. Seems like something has gone wrong way earlier? I am trying to keep sales and support directly plugged into engineering, with latter being responsible for establishing, policing, and communicating proper scope. It educates sales of what's possible, but also educates engineering of the real-world impact of their action and inaction. We're a still a small company though, I don't know if I can keep it that way.

sctb 9y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149238