For the past few days, I’ve been listening to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk through Audible. It’s been pretty enlightening so far and shares a pretty detailed look into Musk’s life and way of thinking about business and development. Given his recent elevation within the public eye through DOGE, trying to understand how he thinks about process is very valuable.
One concept the book keeps reiterating is his “algorithm:”
- Question every requirement
- Delete any part of the process you can
- Simplify and optimize
- Accelerate cycle time
- Automate
Paired with this is the idea that, if you’re not adding back at least 10% of the things you cut out of a process, you’re not cutting enough. While I might disagree at how this concept has been applied to government services, it still resonates with me and I can’t say it’s a bad idea.
Managing IT Sprawl
For several years, I was the VP in charge of various IT operations at different companies – one a large multinational, publicly-traded enterprise and another a significantly smaller yet still sizable startup. In both organizations I was responsible both for people management and budget – so keeping things on track was critical to my ability to succeed.
At one point, I discovered we were paying for no less than 4 separate communication tools. Some teams used Zoom for meetings and collaboration. Much of the organization used Google (our default for email but also with deep integrations for Meet with our conference rooms) – one of the teams used Google Chat exclusively. Yet other teams had standardized on the Office suite and were leveraging Teams for meetings. Still we paid for an enterprise license to Slack for much of our conversations.
None of these tools were free.
I took everything except for Google to the chopping block and either eliminated products entirely or pared down to the minimum configuration necessary for teams to execute. It was effective and saved our team over $500k each year! Even if it was over the objections of “but we’ve used this tool forever and don’t want to move.”
Decision Reversals
With a different team, I discovered we’d signed two $200k/year contracts with vendors of products either that we didn’t use or only used for a single individual contributor. I immediately cancelled both contracts to save on budget.
Then received an angry phone call from another manager.
One of those tools, while entirely unused, was cited in a footnote on a government contract. While the license was entirely unnecessary, removing it would require resubmitting and reauthorizing the entire project with our government partners. While the IT cost was $200k, re-authorization of the project would have required a fresh $1m audit of the system.
If you’re not adding things back in at least 10% of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough.
– Elon Musk
I called the vendor to apologize and we restarted out contract immediately.
Iterative Process
Process management is, itself, an iterative process. There are few “one way doors” in either business or technology.
Make a decision – quickly. If, later on, you discover the decision wasn’t the right one, revert it – just as quickly.
A bias for action is what sets good managers and successful companies apart from the rest of the pack. It helps drive process improvements forward and create simpler, faster systems. Don’t leave process (or tools) in place without good reason.
Identify the waste quickly, jettison it even faster, and revisit your decisions to gauge efficacy regularly.
