An Email From Elon Musk Reveals Why Managers Are Always a Bad idea
By Chuck Blakeman Founder, Crankset Group @ChuckBlakeman
Survey.com's annual "Wasting Time at Work" report revealed that if you eliminate managers completely, you remove 75 percent of the reasons someone will leave your company. There is a simple reason for that. They're in the way, literally. Elon Musk knows that, and isn't alone.
Before Elon Musk, There Was Gore
Bill Gore, co-inventor of Gore-Tex and founder of the $3.3 billion company W. L. Gore, understood the idea implicitly and built his entire company around self-managed teams and the absence of managers of any kind. In 1976, he published a simple paper called "The Lattice Organization" that described how a company of any size (Gore has 10,200 staff) could run much better without managers. He expressed the simplicity of an organization designed around the Lattice concept in the following illustration.
The message: collaborate with whomever you need to, whenever you need to, without ever going through a manager to get to anyone.
This brilliantly simple illustration of an organization built around efficient and effective communications makes it very clear that if you need something from someone else in the organization, you go to that person. If your team needs something from another team, you go to that team. In the Lattice Organization, there are no managers, or inboxes and outboxes at multiple levels, or politics and departmental fiefdoms to wade through. Today, there are nearly a hundred very large companies like W. L. Gore that operate this way and thousands of smaller ones.
An Enduring Truth
The Lattice Organization continues to spread. An internal email, revealed only recently, from Elon Musk to all Tesla staff shows that Musk intuitively understands that managers add no value in pushing great ideas forward, but instead are more likely to slow down innovation, communications, and production. It's the Lattice concept clearly articulated once again, 40 years later by a business leader of the next generation:
From: Elon Musk
To: All Tesla Staff
Subject: Communication Within Tesla
There are two schools of thought about how information should flow. 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 enhances the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company.
To solve a problem quickly, two people in different depts should simply talk and make the right thing happen. Instead, 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 to ensure 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
W. L. Gore never had to send such an email, and if Musk is serious about keeping managers from being obstructionists, he would do well to eliminate them altogether as Gore and many other companies have done. But clearly Musk gets that they don't naturally add value to the communications and innovations chains. To the contrary, their natural obstructionism must be mitigated against as a firing offense.
Loyalty to the Hierarchy
Is your company addicted to serving hierarchies or getting things done? Musk warned that managers will get fired for even allowing communications to go through them. In almost all companies, people get fired for going directly to the source of an answer instead of paying homage and worshiping at the feet of the hierarchy. In companies with managers, Dilbert reigns, and the only solution is an email from the top of the pyramid demanding that managers stay out of the way.
As Musk says and Gore illustrates, this is all incredibly dumb. Yet most companies continue to allow managers to exist, slow things down, and gum up the works with power struggles and politics, in the face of simple logic that says they don't add value. Musk warns that people should get fired for getting in the middle of collaboration, yet that is at the very core of a manager's job -- to get in the middle of everything.
Unencumbered Communications
Do you want yours to be a great company with 100 percent engagement where everyone works for the company, instead of some incredibly dumb, departmental fiefdom? Eliminating the requirement to communicate through managers is a great step in that direction. A hundred large companies and thousands of smaller ones have already figured that out.
It's your turn.
原文链接：https://www.inc.com/chuck-blakeman/an-email-from-elon-musk-reveals-why-managers-are-always-a-bad-idea.html
观点
2017年10月31日
新创
「杰客」以短工岗位切入共享人才市场，自由用工在未来是否会成为主流？
近些年，“共享经济”时代的来临催生了一大批“自由职业者”，而企业对削减成本孜孜不倦的追求又兴旺了项目外包市场。类似的对接平台由职业者招聘平台的自客、采用人天制的自由职客；国外则有 Freelancer、Upwork、HopWork。
这种平台的逻辑一般是这样的：平台一方面聚集了大量自由职业者，企业在平台发布任务，由平台或者项目经理将其需求标准化后，再对接给合适的个人或团队。款项一般由平台托管，项目完成后经平台从中抽取一定的费用后，再把其交给项目实施方。这样做的好处是去除了中间一个又一个中介公司，提高效率的同时又降低了甲方的成本，乙方也能获得更多报酬。
杰客网具体的业务线分为如下3大类：
第一类和上文提到的一般自由职业者平台逻辑是差不多的，C 端用户注册成为自由职业者后，填写好个人资料后即可等待雇主的雇佣。这种模式有以下几点值得注意的：首先自由职业者可按自己的标准定价，比如画家按作品付钱、编辑按字数付钱、模特按时间付钱。其次不同于一般全职招聘网站往往是把个人信息放在最前面，杰客网会将自由职业者曾经担任的职位和经历放在最前面，给雇主一个直观地参考。
第二类服务可以将其理解为“自由职业者界的京东自营”，当企业对活动效果有较高需求时，可以找到杰客网的项目经理，项目经理把这些需求标准化后再交给经过杰客网认证过的第三方供应商来达成，这些认证供应商均是和杰克网之前就有过合作的、经过平台认可并在一些大型公司有过工作经历的自由职业者。
每一个这种“京东自营项目”，杰客网都会成立一个小团队，包括平台出一个项目经理，剩下的团队人员都是由经过认证的供应商所派对。雇主会提前获悉此团队的所有人员状况。
大家都知道这种服务是很难标准化的，杰客网给出的方案是将“结果标准化”。比如一个短视频拍摄请求，平台会提前给雇主一个表格，指出拍摄这个视频会包含几个机位、需要多长时间拍摄、会从什么角度拍摄及最终会剪辑成几个版本，尽量提前让雇主获悉结果后再决定是否使用。据创始人介绍，该服务能为甲方节省30%-40%的费用。
该服务主要覆盖的行业包括摄影、摄像，如商务人像摄影、公关活动摄影、产品视频；创意设计，具体包括企业的 Logo 设计、VI 设计；活动服务。
第三类服务是整包业务线。比如企业提出开发布会需求，杰客网会开始到结束一手承办该发布会。特点是每一个环节都做到了价格透明化，雇主可以看到所有的服务人员。
创始人何睦在开始项目之前，曾经担任过为期半年的自由职业者，并在这期间积攒了第一批 C 端种子用户；为了积攒第一批 B 端用户，何睦在项目起步阶段会刷各大招聘类网站的即时招聘需求，并给这些企业提供一些即时性职位。以这样的方式累计了第一批 B 端企业，之后再慢慢经过口耳相传获取更多客源。
为了防止跳单情况的发生，杰客网通过一系列机制让自由职业者们产生平台的依赖性，比如自由职业者的最大痛点：找客户难和尾款拖欠。这两个大问题在杰客网上可以得到最大化的解决，同时，代缴社保、代开发票、线下沙龙、公开演讲等增值服务让每一个自由职业者产生归属感。杰客网还通过如红人榜、付费发表作品等一系列模式增加自由职业者们的参与度。
当谈到和上文提到的大鲲、自客的区别时，创始人何睦首先表示欢迎竞争，大家共同教育这个市场。其次，杰客主要服务的行业是一些工期短、不需要后期跟进的短工行业，包括市场、公关和活动，具体的岗位有艺术演出、创意设计、模特、翻译、文案、写作撰稿、摄影摄像、视频制作、花艺等。这些岗位大都从几小时到十几天就能完成。相比于动辄需要花费开发人员数月才能开发出来的 IT 外包（还不包括后期的维护），这些短期服务相对比较容易对接。
该项目于15年9月正式启动，启动时融资300万元。目前已有20万自由职业者入驻，每天更新数百条技能信息；合作企业达到了48000家。创始人何睦是名连续创业者。2012年第一次在传统行业创业，第二年实现了盈利。运营总监纪勇有从事广告行业10年的经验。目前团队全职15人。
来源：36氪，作者：徐宇。转载或内容合作请联系zhuanzai@36kr.com；违规转载法律必究。
硅谷
观点
新创
硅谷
投融资
投融资
资讯
资讯
资讯
资讯
扫一扫 加微信
hrtechchina
