An email from Elon Musk to employees: “Communication Within Tesla”
inc.com
inc.com
Assume positive intent. This business of putting in complaints behind someone's back (bear in mind OP asked for permission!!!) is just childish
My manager explained the situation to me but it still doesn't make sense in hindsight.
There exists two companies in the US headquartered in two different cities. Some bankers buy both. Now the reason I bring it up is I wanted some fairly simple information about some configuration on one of the services that a team that came from the other company, based in a different city. First thing I try is message the person on Lync (imagine a shitty msn messenger). No response. I know you're online! I talked to my boss to see who else might be able to answer my question. He tried to get in touch with the other guy and cc'ed his boss. Radio silence.
A week later the other boss sends a forward. The other boss explains he had been on vacation for a week and didn't check his emails. The forward also has the answer from the other developer from a week prior.
We are not talking super secret missile launch codes. It is a fairly boring detail but the developer didn't hit reply all to the email, sending it only to his boss.
By the way the employee didnt complain. They were happy to have someone fixing their companies app. The sales manager was watching from afar with dissent. Plus I tried asking the programming manager about the app first, so he could follow company hierarchy. He was too busy playing video games on his PC & just shrugged his shoulders. My choices were basically slack off like him, snitch on him to the CEO, or go get the answer elsewhere. The latter seemed most appropriate.
This is not how things work in big companies. You should have contacted you boss, discuss with him of the improvement suggestions and your plan, so that he may contact the sales boss, and present it to him, emphasizing the performance improvements that could be brought, and, after two of three long and boring meetings, start to schedule a volunteer program where you would monitor specific parts of someone's job. All of this will require weeks (or months) of political discussions, carefully crafted powerpoints, subtle emails that will attempt to balance political interests of each parties, and, if you are smart enough to put key managers ego on a pedestal, your project may succeed (and of course you're probably never going to be credited for that)
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.
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."
That said, working over 14 hours per day 7 days a week is implausible to me. Maybe in short bursts but I doubt he does that for any stretch of time.
The Elon Musk PR machine & cult of public enthusiasm is a massive business asset. When you're in the business of selling dreams to investors and employees pushing themselves to the limit this type of 'fact' is going to get thrown around.
myself I have been around some six to six executives who even at parties talk shop. hell we used to joke that when one went on vacation it only made his emails longer
Overall its hard to believe considering he also has Space x and other investments and im suresomeone is streching the truth. But I dont doubt the guy lives and breaths his work.
I think I read somewhere that somewhere in France or Germany some city or some department/province said you can't require your employees to promptly respond to emails outside of their work hours (I imagine they don't have "at-will" employment).
It's so fundamentally opposite to my experience, and I'm curious about what's driving you to work like this.
But.. to each thir own, I suppose.
I also find that sometimes “my time” looks an awful lot like work in the sense that I might do very similar things (hey, I enjoy programming!), the difference is that one is done on my terms, when and how I want and I do it to relax, have fun or otherwise do something I want, while the other is something I do because I have to.
If you count all that stuff then the average person is probably working more than 8 hours too.
Elon is cool and all, but his fanboys are making the whole thing really ridiculous. Btw, it might even be true, but can we falsify it? Exactly as in religion (to give it in Karl Popper's terms).
Organizing food and eating - another 2 hours. If cooking add an hour to that so 3 hours for food.
For cleaning and basic home maintenance - minimum 1 hour. Personal hygiene - add an hour so total 2 hours.
Commuting if necessary - 1 hour minimum.
Add 8 hours or let's be harder and take 6 hours for sleep. That's a total of 14 hours that can't be negotiated leaving you with 10 hours for work.
Given the brain will not operate at that stretch you need distraction, so web, tv, books, games, movies - another 2-3 hours. So 7-8 hours seems to the the maximum any human being can work.
If you don't have family and friends and someone takes care of food and maintenance you can get an additional 4 hours. So anything beyond 10-12 hours seems physically impossible, and this is with 6 hours sleep, no family and all responsibilities taken care of.
If you think Elon Musk spends 2-3 hours per day on eating, then I'm not sure what I can say further.
You either have to source food from markets and cook it, have it cooked, eat at a restaurant or order out, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. All this takes time as does time to actually eat the food.
If you have a family multiply the time required. If you can do all the above in less than 3 hours it's worth sharing.
That's why working interrupted is a privilege, as other people take care of necessities for you. Elon musk working 14 hours is not anything special if he has people doing things for him, the average person does not have this privilege and anyone with similar privilege can do the same thing.
Trivial if you consider your time to be worth > $1,000 / hour.
Even still, I source my own food, cook it, and eat it three times a day and don't spend 3hrs/day every day doing so (and those who know me know I cook pretty fancy meals).
The point was about privilege and the average person. Obviously you will have more time if you have people taking care of things for you or are Usain Bolt with food like yourself, but this does not apply to the average person.
If they had the same privilege as Musk they too can work 14 hours a day so it's not noteworthy in any particular way.
> The ability to work uninterrupted is a privilege.
Yes, it is a privilege, but that doesn't negate that the rest of the post is completely false conjecture by one person.
> That's a total of 14 hours that can't be negotiated
If it can't be negotiated, then why do many people do it, especially ones who are more well off financially?
> 10 hours for work. Given the brain will not operate at that stretch you need distraction, so web, tv, books, games, movies - another 2-3 hours. So 7-8 hours seems to the the maximum any human being can work.
I'm not sure why I am even bothering to reply to that, but if you think that's true then honestly we aren't having an intelligent debate and so my time is being wasted.
> So anything beyond 10-12 hours [working] seems physically impossible
Same as above.
I still question those numbers, and even more so whether or not he can work effectively for that amount of time, though.
I agree completely with you here, the numbers are obviously padded vs what many normally think is "work". But the reality is that many actually work far more hours per day than they realize if the use a similar definition of "work" as what's used for Musk's number here. How many of us lay in bed thinking about a tough work problem? While quickly snarfing down food sitting at your desk, are you not reading emails or similar? Do you go to networking events and talk business? That's all "work" technically if you're being liberal with the definition (and honestly, it's not unreasonable to call that "work").
[1] When not at home, eg in the office, then I spend a lot more time getting/eating lunch, but its generally to get away from work so I would spend the time away from work anyway.
It does seem pretty unlikely unless he's counting Networking/social type events in the evenings and stuff.
I sometimes wonder, whether such a hyped personality could be completely synthesized. Just a actor and a really good propaganda show. And if all those morons going along for the ride, would learn from that being revealed.
"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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
Many senior managers are little more than human message routers.
I very rarely need all the details someone thinks are important in order to make a decision.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
If you give things short vivid names you'll be less tempted to acronym them.