“Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time.… Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value.”
Walk Out of the Meeting
From Elon Musk’s productivity memo to Tesla employees, sent Tuesday, April 17, 2018, and first reported by Electrek and Jalopnik that week before being authenticated by CNBC. The memo went out in the middle of Model 3 “production hell,” with Tesla halting the assembly line to upgrade equipment in pursuit of 6,000 units per week by the end of June. The two sentences are the first and third items of a six-item list; the rest tells managers to drop meeting frequency once urgency passes, to skip the chain of command in favor of the shortest communication path, and to avoid internal acronyms.
The diagnosis is older than Musk. Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s Parkinson’s Law (1957) describes how committee work expands to fill the time available and how trivial agenda items absorb disproportionate discussion, the original source of what is now called bikeshedding. Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law, elsewhere in this collection, is the same observation pointed at staffing: meetings multiply because the people who run them are paid to run meetings, not to produce the company’s output. None of this is news.
What is unusual is the second sentence. Most companies tolerate the diagnosis but make the cure socially expensive: leaving a meeting early reads as rude, dismissive, or politically tone-deaf. The memo flips the default. The norm in the room is set by what senior people do, and a CEO saying to leave when you stop being useful gives everyone else cover to do it. The diagnosis is cheap; permission to act on it is the part that has to come from the top.