If the matter is time-sensitive then I need to ask whether the user is available or not to provide an answer.
u1: Hi, can you switch to the alternate server, the main one is crashing
[... 12 hours later, when the problem has already been resolved]
u2: Sure thing, let me do it.
u1: STOOOOOOOOOP!
I had great success by doing intermittent fasting (I don't do it anymore). I had pollen, grass allergies, various food intolerance. I couldn't eat plums, grapes, figs, cherries, even bananas. My throat would get sore and lips swell.
After changing my diet and doing intermittent fasting for about a year I completely cured myself. I haven't grass allergy in more than 5 years. I can eat any fruit without any signs of discomfort.
> 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.
This is a way to create a clusterfuck. Nothing is worse than having people barging in from other departments going over managers' heads and imposing their own priorities.
I'm a huge fan of this. But it relies on your co-workers having commons sense, the ability to logically reason, and to have the ability to judge priorities on their own.
This is how a company should operate. Where everyone is on the same team, working to solve the most pressing problems, and working on what on what justifiably blocks the company from it's most critical goals.
Again its critical to hire non-idiots, and this works great. Hence why people who do things without rationally justifiable reasons get fired from Tesla regularly.
I disagree: I have seen so many situations where a simple piece of information turns into a game of Telephone and a political football, resulting in absurd delays.
That's not the same as imposing different priorities, it's just a question of "I need X in order to do Y".
Provide some examples of when this happened, why it caused harm, and to what degree the harms from this sort of thing outweighed the benefits.
One would generally assume that if someone from another department is commenting on something, particularly if they are a lower level employee, they are generally doing it because they genuinely believe there is some kind of important issue.
And even if it turns out that it isn't important, the time spent briefly annoying someone is generally going to be much less costly than overlooking an issue of actual importance.
I think it depends on the sensitivity/urgency of the matter. Its better to avoid chain of command in urgent matters that an employee might feel slows down production for example. In other cases common sense dictates going through the chain in order to avoid chaos as you describe.
Off-topic: what is the deal with articles that have giant GIFs after each paragraph? I get it, it is supposed to be funny, but it becomes annoyance very soon. One or two is fine, but not a myriad. Also, when at work, makes me make close the page faster. /rant
I always hear about this abstract guidance to get ideas but haven't had a chance to find a domain expert willing to spend time on sharing the thoughts. What are good examples of when ideas generated this way formed a startup in the past?
For me, this started with some broad knowledge about a few industries. E.g. I have experience building connected devices and visualizing / analyzing data from those devices. I tried to meet as many senior managers as I could (think execs or experts) in my network. I knew I was interested in life sciences, energy management and robotics, so I sought out people in those industries.
I described what I was working on, what research I did on those industries and that I was looking to better understand the existing problems that might fit what I was interested in.
Some conversations did not lead anywhere, other times I got excellent, tactical, advice. That gave me more information and ideas, until I landed on my current project.
The reason this approach worked for me this time (as opposed to the other times I've tried this) is that I had a direction I was presenting and I did a bunch of research to get educated about some of these industries. I don't mean I studied it for some long time, but reading related subreddits, searching for conferences and looking up sponsor companies from that, learning some terms specific to those industries, etc. helped to have a better conversation.
While YMMV, getting warm intros to smart and successful people for a 15-20 minute phone conversation will expose you to what you don't know yet. This will result in you asking better questions, which can lead to more ideas.
Very simple game - click any of three buttons below to increase one of the two numbers. The color of the button corresponds to the number that is going to be increased. Try to make the choice before the timer runs out. The bigger the numbers the faster the timer. In the event the numbers match - Unison! - the timer resets.
