Elon Musk: Just walk out of bad meetings

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43809674

by ikeyany • 8 years ago

51 47 8 years ago

bbc.co.uk

rmason2• 8 years ago

I shudder to think how much more I could have accomplished if I'd worked for a CEO who had my back like that! I've had jobs where half my time was coding and the other half was in meetings. When all I wanted to do was code. Guess that might be why I was attracted to startups in the first place!

mempko3• 8 years ago

While meetings can be unproductive in the form of code, your mind shouldn't be unproductive. Often boring meetings are a good time to reflect and daydream and improve designs.

Productivity is the greatest source of waste. Coding the wrong thing is worse than being in a long meeting which might have led you to code the right thing. And by write/wrong I mean for the user.

Coding is the easy part of software creation. You can teach anyone any technical skill in a fairly short amount of time. Teaching someone systems thinking, and UI design, and just plain good taste is much harder.

PierceJoy• 8 years ago

You're assuming that the meeting will result in the correct thing being done. In my experience, that's not at all guaranteed.

The most efficient path to doing the right thing for the user is just to do something, get feedback, and iterate quickly.

CuriouslyC• 8 years ago

Ponderous meetings don't design good software. Every meeting heavy piece of software I worked on was hot garbage. You're much more likely to get good software if you have the engineers do the job themselves, then tell them to start automating. Once that's done, have the engineers train people to use what they've created full time, and watch them automate that (by simplifying and writing help docs) as well.

viach• 8 years ago

I guess doing only coding would work great, with only nuance - if you are the only who is coding at company .

mehrdadn6• 8 years ago

He didn't say walk out of meetings if you like to code instead; he said walk out of unproductive meetings, if they're wasting people's time. There's a fine line there...

SmellyGeekBoy• 8 years ago

In my experience genuinely productive meetings are rare...

theseanstewart• 8 years ago

The point the parent comment is trying to make is that meetings are a waste of people's time. Most software engineers will agree that the majority of meetings are unproductive.

rmason2• 8 years ago

Sorry if I didn't make it clear but I would have only walked out of worthless meetings, not all meetings. I've had meetings in my career where I didn't know why I was even there and those where nothing was ever decided.

BjoernKW• 8 years ago

I'm very much in favour of cutting down on pointless meetings and processes for processes' sake. However, I think that "just wanting to code" can be an organizational anti-pattern as well.

Code doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's only by context that code is provided with value and meaning. If you're the only person working on the code and you know exactly what you want to achieve then just wanting to code might work. In almost any other case you have to communicate about what the code is actually supposed to do because otherwise you're likely to create wasteful instead of useful code.

RobLach• 8 years ago

Sounds like a minefield honestly.

Being lower in the hierarchy but making decisions whether a meeting is worth your time pushes a ton of risk onto you if there is a mishap.

How do you respond to "You would have known if you stayed at the meeting"? Would the CEO have your back? How many times before you start getting a "problem employee" reputation.

I think you'd quickly realize to just stay at meetings but now you have no grounds to bring up criticism since it is assumed you could just walk out.

AmericanChopper• 8 years ago

You would have known if you stayed at the meeting

If a meeting is structured such that an attendee has enough time to realize it's pointless and leave before the meeting gets around to the important part, then it's a bad meeting. That meeting sounds like it should have been an email, or a message in an IM channel, or even more than one smaller meetings.

A manager who structures meetings so that people have to sit through pointless drivel in order to receive one or two important nuggets of information, is a bad manager who's scheduling exactly the kind of bad meetings that Musk is talking about.

gtirloni• 8 years ago

It must be hard to manage a company in the age of online outrage and excessive media attention. I imagine people will censor themselves in meetings/emails for fear of it getting 'leaked'. A bit similar to the kind of self-censoring people will do in authoritarian governments.

shanghaiaway2• 8 years ago

This email was meant to leak.

sillysaurus3• 8 years ago

A leaked email outlined other ways staff could help streamline operations.

These include walking out of meetings, sidestepping the chain of command and ignoring company rules on occasion.

Thought experiment: Imagine you were reading this about Uber, not Tesla. Why would you feel differently? How about back when Kalanick was CEO?

cfadvan• 8 years ago

The people who need to hear what you’re saying are desperate not to. Until a critical mass realize that Musk is trying to get rich, not send them to Mars, you will be shouted down. It’s like sports fans; when their team wins despite career-ending fouls they’re not saying, “oh that’s it for my team,” they’re saying, “We did it, and with only nine men!!”

When the reality distortion bubble bursts on this one, only then will cutting corners, treating employees badly, deceptive and dangerous marketing around autopilot, and endless unfounded hype be seen as unacceptable.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/californi...

madamelic• 8 years ago

I'd imagine at a large enough company there are bound to be obviously dumb rules that some low-level manager invented to power-trip ("All employees must walk on the right-hand side to walk to the left-most bathroom past 3pm").

My only concern is that it will be less "ignore obviously dumb rules" and more "ignore safety precautions".

tntn• 8 years ago

If I were reading this about Uber, my first response would be surprise that they have company rules.

unethical_ban• 8 years ago

Violate company rules is a dangerous thing to say (or admit publicly; seems like a tee-up to a lawsuit). But the other two... those make sense.

erikb2• 8 years ago

says the guy who still has a few millions on the bank when he drops all his jobs. This is really the kind of stuff where an entrepreneur who never really worked a real job to pay rent (i.e. because he has no alternative) is a really bad manager. The advise sounds reasonable on paper, but that's simply not how people work.

mixedCase• 8 years ago

This is a recommendation he's passing onto his own employees.

mehrdadn6• 8 years ago

This is a recommendation he's passing onto his own employees.

I think it was clear the parent already understood that when they said

> This is really the kind of stuff where [he] is a really bad manager.

Reedx• 8 years ago

Eh, I don't think that's fair. You're talking about someone who used to budget $1/day for food and showered at the YMCA.

carlosdp2• 8 years ago

Yea the guy basically went bankrupt back when SpaceX and Tesla weren't yet doing so hot and almost lost everything. He gets pretty emotional talking about it even [0]. Whatever you think of him, I would caution confusing extreme optimism and directness for being out of touch.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo

shanghaiaway2• 8 years ago

Completely different. It isn't about being wealthy or not. Musk has never had a 9 to 5 job so he doesn't understand how that world works. Nobody just walks out of meetings like that.

cheeze• 8 years ago

Have you... Ever read anything about his early life? He wasn't dirt poor but he certainly wasn't born into wealth.

senatorobama• 8 years ago

What? His dad was a millionaire and also a weirdo.

LandR• 8 years ago

I hate time wasting meetings, I was on a conference call one time that had gone on for over 90 minutes over a completely inane decision. At one point I got up from my desk, left the building and went and bought a box of doughnuts from a store five minutes from office. I came back a d had missed nothing and no one had noticed I was gone. utterly pointless.

I'm sure the majority of these pointless meetings are just organised by "business" people to justify their jobs. If they aren't in meetings what would they actually do with their day...

The meeting was a discussion for what limit to put on number of items for a proposed new kanban column. 90 minutes to discuss if it should be zero or one, they couldn't agree so ditched the entire column proposal altogether.. Sigh.

Thus was at a time where we already I think 13 columns on our kanban because of someone spending all day seemingly working on dev process and i guess columns were there way to show they had done somethinf....

rwcarlsen• 8 years ago

The actual quote has a slightly different meaning than what many are assuming - as far as I understand the actual quote was this:

"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," Musk writes.

from http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-productivity-tip-le...

djrogers2• 8 years ago

That's not actually what he said - the article cuts his quote in half, and seems to attribute sentiment that's not there:

"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."

This is a weird, and somewhat sensational, interpretation of that line in the memo. It is clear that the mandate is to only hold useful meetings, only as often, and for as long as they're necessary. Nothing strange about that kind of mentality...

notyourday• 8 years ago

So he Pulls a Fixler?

mehrdadn6• 8 years ago

Could you explain what the massive implication difference between the quote and the paraphrase is? I'm not seeing it for some reason.

carlosdp2• 8 years ago

I think the big difference is in the actual quote, he's not saying walk in to a meeting and say "this is dumb" and leave. He's saying the meeting might start out being useful, but then end up slowing down or going into a tangent, and when it just becomes corporate speak and the topic doesn't actually interest you, you should leave or the meeting should probably end there.

djrogers2• 8 years ago

The entire quote doesn't actually say anything about 'bad meetings', it says that you should leave when you are no longer contributing to one. How many times have you sat through an hour-long meeting after your 5 minutes of review/updates are over? That's what he's talking about - if you're clearly not needed anymore, you don't have to stay in order to be polite.

pascalxus• 8 years ago

Come on, would it really be the end of the world, if they got another small round of investment just until they hit that 6000 a week mark?

If tesla really is as good of an investment as they say it is, then the situation is nowhere near that dire. From the sounds of it, they're going to make their 6K per week, it's just a question of when. By all means, be efficient and cancel those meetings. But you don't need to push employees to the brink of failure.

remir• 8 years ago

"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."

The entire memo: https://electrek.co/2018/04/17/tesla-model-3-production-goal...

purplezooey• 8 years ago

Elon Musk always has advice for other people that we can't follow because we're not also rich. Just walk out of meetings. OK.

Elon Musk: Just walk out of bad meetings

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