Disease of Bureaucracy?

Elon Musk of TESLA, and the CEO of JP Morgan/Chase Jamie Dimon talk about the 'disease of bureaucracy' and why most meetings are a waste of time.  (Thanks to Kevin Dearing!)

https://www.thestreet.com/world/teslas-elon-musk-joins-jpmorgan-chief-dimon-in-rejecting-bureaucratic-meetings-14559824?puc=yahoo&cm_ven=YAHOO&yptr=yahoo

Most notably, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM - Get Report)  CEO Jamie Dimon said in his most recent letter to shareholders that "bureaucracy is a disease."

"Bureaucracy drives out good people, slows down decision making, kills innovation and is often the petri dish of bad politics," Dimon wrote. "Large organizations, in fact all organizations, should be thought of as always slowing down and getting more bureaucratic. Therefore, leaders must continually drive for speed and accuracy to eliminate waste and kill bureaucracy. When you get in great shape, you don't stop exercising."

Dimon said his bank will limit internal meetings, which can be a "giant waste of time and money." JPMorgan will focus on its "war rooms," each "staffed with a dedicated group of employees tasked with solving specific problems within a set number of weeks or months."

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• "Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get off 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."