Would You Survive Working For Elon Musk?

Key Takeaways

• Elon Musk has six rules that he recommends to ensure workplace productivity.
• These rules revolve around minimizing time spent in meetings and communicating clearly.
• Musk likely hopes these rules will help make his purchase of Twitter a successful investment.

Elon Musk, the controversial man behind Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter, is in the headlines almost every day for his business decisions and the management techniques he uses.

Proponents of Musk claim that he’s a highly effective and productive individual. However, detractors argue that he expects unreasonable levels of work from his employees.

Either way, it’s interesting to look at his management techniques and rules for productivity to see if you can apply them in your workplace.

Elon Musk’s six rules of productivity

In an email leaked last month, Elon Musk’s six rules for productivity were shared on Twitter. They generally relate to meetings and the handling of communication.

No large meetings

The first of the rules that Musk recommends is to avoid large meetings. He says, “excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get off all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience.”

This makes some sense. Imagine an hour-long meeting with eight attendees. That meeting consumes eight person-hours, the equivalent of an entire workday. Double the meeting’s size, and now you’ve eaten up the equivalent of two work days for one employee.

If even a few people are in the meeting but not getting anything out of it, you’re losing hours or days of productivity.

No long or frequent meetings

Related to the ban on large meetings, Musk says, “get rid of frequent meetings unless you’re dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.”

Again, more frequent meetings mean more time talking and less time taking care of necessary tasks. By reducing meeting frequency, attendees can spend more time working.

Don’t be afraid to leave

Musk recommends that people “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 the third and final meeting-related rule Musk advocates for. Once again, it goes back to lost working time.

Giving people the power to leave meetings that they aren’t benefiting from or aren’t actively assisting other people gives them more time to focus on productive tasks and reduces wasted time.

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No acronyms or jargon

Musk’s next three rules revolve around how communication should be handled within a company.

His first rule about communication is “don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes… In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function.”

In many businesses, acronyms and jargon have become the norm, and it’s easy to use them, even outside your typical audience. This leaves the people you’re talking to confused or bogs things down by forcing them to ask for an explanation.

Instead of saying, “our ITSM team uses ITIL to reduce the MTTR on break-fix issues,” saying, “our technology support team uses a specific set of processes to solve customers’ computer problems more quickly” gets the same idea across more effectively.

Ignore the chain of command

Musk advocates that people ignore the chain of command and that “communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done.”

He continues, “if, in order to get something done between departments, an individual contributor has to talk to a 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.”

All these levels of communication slow things down and increase the risk of miscommunication. The fewer levels between the two people who need to talk or get something done, the smoother the process will be.

Use common sense

Finally, Musk says, “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.”

Essentially, if there’s a more logical way to do something, opt for that to increase efficiency.

Do these rules work?

The real question to ask isn’t what Musk’s rules for productivity are but whether or not they work.

At a basic level, these rules make sense. The more time people spend in meetings, the less time they have to work on things that push a company forward. Similarly, the more time people spend communicating and the more miscommunications that occur, the slower things get done.

In many people’s eyes, Musk’s track record is hit or miss. Tesla has seen great success and is worth more than $570 billion. It is one of the most influential electric car manufacturers on the planet.

However, others view Musk’s acquisition and current management of Twitter less positively. He laid off large portions of its staff soon after he took the helm, and his demand that employees commit to “long hours at high intensity” under his new vision for Twitter 2.0 led to more attrition.

In the weeks since, Twitter has experienced glitches and issues, including the notifications system breaking multiple times, two-factor authentication breaking for a short period, and other problems.

There have also been questionable decisions, such as the reinstatement of many controversial accounts banned for violating hate speech rules.

It remains to be seen whether Musk’s vision for his new company and his rules for productivity can help Twitter succeed and continue to help his other companies grow.

Bottom Line

Musk is one of the most famous business owners in the world today, and his reach is massive thanks to his presence on Twitter. Many people look to emulate his management style and find his productivity rules useful.

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