What would Musk actually do with the five bullet points from 2 million workers?

[msmith537]

@leahcim

@CookingWithGas

The biggest improvements come in business process redesign, not technology. The effective application of technology I have seen is when it is part of a business process analysis and design. The worst way to apply technology is to automate existing inefficient processes, which is the easiest way to do it and what is often done.

I’ve seen it phrased as “you don’t know how to solve a problem with code if you don’t know how to solve it without code”.

A company I used to work for had a C-level exec who wanted a “submit a report about what you did last week” every week. The process went basically like:

1. Employees start submitting reports every week. Exec cracks down on people not submitting reports.
2. Employees realize that no one is actually reading the reports and the exec has stopped paying attention, so they gradually stop submitting reports.
3. Exec notices that people have stopped submitting the reports, and calls a company-wide meeting chastising people for not submitting reports. People revert to step 1.

The entire cycle took about eight months to a year to complete (with most of the time in phase 2). Never once did the content of the reports have any impact on anything.

I think there must be a management methodology book somewhere that starts with “have everyone send a report on what they did in the last week” that probably has many other steps, but no one gets past the first step. (Like software companies “going agile” which begins and ends with “having daily standups”).

This is basically what I do for a living. Try to help companies get better at running big complex projects. It’s remarkable at how bad a lot of companies are at it and how cheap they are when it comes to fixing them.

The problem is that companies are full of all these empty suits who don’t really know how to do anything or how anything actually works. They just talk in circles endlessly and hope it just happens automagically. Technically as a consultant MBA type I suppose I’m one of them, But I like to think because of my engineering background I’m somewhat grounded in actually getting stuff built.

But at the end of the day, mostly what we end up doing is taking a lot of meeting minutes and sending pretty executive status reports where people care more about the RAG status using the correct shade of “red” than they do about it indicating the project has gone to shit.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@msmith537

But at the end of the day, mostly what we end up doing is taking a lot of meeting minutes and sending pretty executive status reports where people care more about the RAG status using the correct shade of “red” than they do about it indicating the project has gone to shit.

I think you’re doing it wrong. According to the documentary series I watched on management consulting, you are supposed to be wowing clients with gorgeous slide decks full of amazing figures pulled directly out of your ass and sleeping with Kristen Bell.

Stranger

[msmith537]

Oh you should have seen the amazing deck I put together a few weeks ago. I’m a bit too old to be sleeping with the 20-something analysts these days. Plus there’s not a lot of getting on planes and taking the client out for drinks at strip clubs anymore.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@msmith537

Plus there’s not a lot of getting on planes and taking the client out for drinks at strip clubs anymore.

Standards have fallen in these dark and dismal times. Who is going to keep the exotic dancer industry afloat?

Stranger

[CookingWithGas]

@msmith537

people care more about the RAG status using the correct shade of “red” than they do about it indicating the project has gone to shit.

We’re getting away from the OP but I have seen many times where nobody wants to admit that a project is in trouble. So you get green…green…green…green…green… then all of a sudden when the obvious is no longer ignorable it goes red. There is something about human nature that nobody wants to be the one to day that a project is in the shitter. Of course, there is also a problem when the senior executives react to bad news by getting pissed off. And further, executives that look at a 12-month project that is 2 months behind schedule and say, OK, how do we make that up? You don’t. You just project how much worse it’s going to get. If we could make up 2 months like that it would have been a 10-month schedule to start with.