Elon Musk Describes What Great Communication Looks Like | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk Describes What Great Communication Looks Like

inc.com

90 pointsendswapper20 comments

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-...

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

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-...

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."

Have you ever been to Pullman? I have, and would question using its (ultimately failed) model as something good to replicate. It is south of Chicago and is just a rotting old town that once was full of trains and heavy in industry. It is a bit depressing to be honest seeing the previous grandeur.

http://www.pullmanil.org

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.

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.

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.

This reminds me of an old game theory exercise I worked that showed how adding a new "shortcut" road to a simple road map slowed traffic down for everyone, and removing it sped everything up.

Thinking about it, I remember a bit more. Imagine two parallel roads, each with two segments. Both are southbound going from index 0 to index 1. A0-A1 is fast, A1-A2 is slow. B0-B1 is slow, B1-B2 is fast.

Introduce a bridge (two-way I believe) going between A1 and B1. There were certain parameter assumptions (traffic levels) that meant it hurt more than it helped.

So what are the conditions where it hurts more? You set up the problem and then left us hanging...

Part of the traffic is a function of the fraction of people taking the road, so I can't describe it without using diagrams. However, I remember that it's called Braess' Paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

And actually, the example I remember is stated in the mathematical example on that page if you scroll down.

Applied to Musk, the answer isn't necessarily to go back to communicating through managers, but probably just to be more deliberate about designing traffic (communication) patterns when you see gluts happening.

Thanks! We've updated the link from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&o....

Flat is hardly a Musk invention.

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

http://www.danpontefract.com/the-book/

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

" The world is flat! "*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com