4 ms·
I found this interesting > Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations: > - Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get wors
by waynenilsen 9y ago
I found this interesting
> Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations:
> - Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.
> - Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.
> - Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.
> - Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.
> - Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.
> - A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.
> - In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.
- aaomidi 9y agoWith all the respect I have for Elon, I don't think he realizes he's not the CEO of a startup company anymore. Getting rid of acronyms will have an inverse effect on productivity. Are you supposed to explain each time you refer to it? I agree if someone is new to the team then you should probably explain a few times before using acronyms. But for established teams, this just slows everyone down. Chain of command is there so that no one goes over the other person's head. If two developers disagree on an approach and one just straight up goes to the manager instead of the project manager it causes issues for the whole team. I'm a fan of "hey you should be able to talk to whomever you want", but not as the default. Company rule is there to protect the worker in case they made a bad decision. As long as it was within the company rule, they can't be blamed as much as "hey I used common sense". For massive companies you need these systems in place.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- uoaei 9y agoSeems like he's advocating little more than "critically examine your behavior and forgo following stupid conventions if you deem them stupid". He's just giving concrete examples to make easier the connection to what that actually would mean in practice. There are smarter-than-average people working at Tesla; they will figure out what is useless and what can be reasonably applied as productivity measure. They just need to be reminded to consider these things every once in a while, like the rest of us.