Elon Musk [Archive.org URL]

As companies grow, one of the biggest challenges is how to maintain cohesion. At the beginning, as companies get bigger, they get more effective through specialization of labor. But when they reach around 1,000 employees and above, you start to see reductions in productivity per person as communication breaks down. If you have a junior person in one department who needs to speak to another department to get something done, he or she should be able to contact the relevant person directly, rather than go through his manager, director, then vice president, then down again, until six bounces later they get to the right person. I am an advocate of ‘least path’ communication, not ‘chain of command’ communication.

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