This is a translation of Elon Musk's internal email. The original English is here

There are two schools of thought about how information should flow within companies. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is that, while it serves to enhance the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company.

There are two ways information can flow within a company. By far the most common is the chain of command, which means you always communicate through your manager. The problem with this approach is that it serves to enhance the power of the manager, but it doesn't serve the company.

Instead of a problem getting solved quickly, where a person in one dept talks to a person in another dept and makes the right thing happen, people are forced to talk to their manager who talks to their manager who talks to the manager in the other dept who talks to someone on his team. Then the info has to flow back the other way again. This is incredibly dumb. Any manager who allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves working at another company. No kidding.

When working across departments, instead of doing the right thing and solving problems quickly, people have to talk to their manager, who talks to the other department's manager, who talks to someone on their team. Then the information has to flow back the same way. This is incredibly dumb. Any manager who allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves working at another company. No kidding.

Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens. The point here is not random chitchat, but rather ensuring that we execute ultra-fast and well. We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility.

Anyone at Tesla can and should email or talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager's manager without their permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another department, you can talk to me. You can talk to anyone without anyone else's permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens. The point here is not random chitchat, but ensuring that we execute ridiculously well and fast. We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility.

One final point is that managers should work hard to ensure that they are not creating silos within the company that create an us vs. them mentality or impede communication in any way. This is unfortunately a natural tendency and needs to be actively fought. How can it possibly help Tesla for depts to erect barriers between themselves or see their success as relative within the company instead of collective? We are all in the same boat. Always view yourself as working for the good of the company and never your dept.

One final point is that managers should work hard to ensure that they are not creating silos within the company that create an "us vs. them" mentality or impede communication in any way. This is unfortunately a natural tendency and needs to be actively fought. How could it possibly help Tesla for departments to erect barriers between themselves or see their success as relative within the company instead of collective? We are all in the same boat. Always view yourself as working for the good of the company and never your department.

In this email, Elon Musk makes two key points. First, he legitimizes ordinary employees going over their managers' heads, so everyone can solve problems with the whole company in mind. Second, he calls for tearing down barriers between departments and working together to make the company better, rather than any single department. He most likely sent this email because collaboration between some departments had broken down badly, and Elon had to step in.

In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz describes a "Freaky Friday" management technique (named after the movie). His company's customer support and sales engineering teams had fallen into blaming and distrusting each other and couldn't work together, which badly hurt the company and its customers. His solution was to have the heads of the two departments swap roles for a week and run each other's teams. After walking in each other's shoes, both managers developed empathy and understood each other's position, and collaboration went much more smoothly afterward.

This reminds me of something I experienced firsthand. There was a lot of tension between the product and sales teams. Sales brought in custom requirements, swearing that if we met them, we'd win the customer. The product and engineering teams worked overtime to build, test, and deliver, but in the end, the customer didn't sign. After this happened several times, the product team began to doubt the sales team's understanding of customers and their ability. Sales, in turn, blamed the back-end teams for not delivering quickly or well enough. When the CEO found out, he gathered all the relevant departments one weekend and had everyone speak their minds face to face and debate their views. He mediated, and afterward each team submitted a written plan for addressing the problems. This case is really about aligning around company goals and the importance of talking face to face. When two teams aren't in the same place and mostly communicate through online tools, they can't see each other's expressions or sense subtle shifts in mood, so misunderstandings are easy. The smart move is for either side to switch to direct, face-to-face conversation as soon as they sense something is off. At the same time, always start from the company's overall goals, reflect on your own team's problems in execution, and propose your own solutions.

On my previous team, presales worked directly with engineers at first, so confirmed issues could be fixed and released quickly. But as presales went to engineers more and more often, the engineers were constantly interrupted and couldn't focus on writing code. After some discussion, we decided that all presales issues and requests had to go through technical support, which would work with back-end engineering, assess priority, and set reasonable timelines for fixes. Is this the opposite of what Elon said? In real work, things are rarely so simple, and you don't have to stick rigidly to one way of communicating. But the guiding principle must be clear: act for the good of the company, not a department, and choose the right way to communicate for the situation.