Elon Musk (Telsa CEO) productivity recommendations:

- Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.

- Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.

- Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

- Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.

- Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

- A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.

- In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.

Source Jalopnik.  See also Musk in more detail on communication here. 

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."  which is attributed to many different writers. 

This difficulty in free expression is one of the reasons why psychological safety as researched by Amy Edmondson and Google Research is so important.

Few people like being told they are not doing their job well. Nevertheless, we should judge if constructive criticism is coming from a place of malicious intent, or positive intent. If positive, then it needs to be taken in the spirit it is given and we can all improve. I believe much internal commentary is with constructive intent - when that is believed, a team gains psychological safety.

If you'd like to feel inspired by other addresses and life lessons try: Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life;  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here. On investing try a thought on stock valuations.  Or Ray Dalio on populism and risk.