The decision-making machine that seizes up

Perché nelle grandi organizzazioni la velocità è diventata un vantaggio fondamentale.

In 2017, Elon Musk sent an e-mail to all Tesla employees.
Subject: Communication Within Tesla.
Four paragraphs. No attachments. No slides.

The e-mail has since become one of the most frequently cited management documents of the past decade, for its ability to identify the real problem with corporate communication and with the way work gets done. It is worth reading it together, to see what it can teach us, and what Italian companies have yet to understand.

Communication Within Tesla

Musk started from a simple distinction.
*There are two philosophies on how information should flow within a company. The first, by far the most widespread, is the chain of command: every communication goes through the manager. All large organisations, for better or worse, behave this way. It is the standard nowadays.
The second, by contrast, is direct communication: whoever has a problem talks to whoever can solve it, regardless of where they sit on the organisational chart.

The problem with the first philosophy, Musk wrote, is that it serves to increase the manager’s power, not to serve the company.

“To solve a problem quickly, two people from two different departments should simply talk and make the right thing happen. Instead, people are forced to talk to their manager, who talks to their manager, who talks to the manager in the other department, who talks to someone on their team. Then the information has to travel back the other way. This is incredibly dumb.”

The conclusion was that anyone at Tesla could and should communicate with anyone else in whatever way they considered fastest to solve a problem in the company’s interest. Directly with a VP, with the CEO, with anyone.
Without asking permission. Feeling obliged to do so until the right thing had happened.

He then added a line that many managers around the world have read with a certain irritation.

“Any manager who allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves working at another company. No kidding.”

That e-mail, curious in tone and certainly peculiar, described the difference between an organisation designed to function and one designed to survive itself.
And today, this gap is becoming evident to everyone.

The cost of delay

The cost of decision-making delay is not abstract: it can be measured in lost competitive positions, opportunities with a limited time window and resources spent regaining ground that should never have been given up.
Here is the full picture:

Every row of this table describes something we have seen happen even in healthy companies, with competent people and good intentions.

And the problem has always been the architecture of decision-making.

Hierarchical structure as a response to the past

All this slowness that characterises us, however (let us be clear), has legitimate origins.
The organisational structures of large Italian companies were designed to manage complexity at a time when complexity required coordination, and coordination required hierarchy.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when many of these structures took shape, hierarchy was the right answer to a real problem. Information was scarce and asymmetric. Communication between offices took time. Delegation without control created risks that organisations lacked the tools to manage. So the answer was the organisation chart and rigidity.

The problem today is that this response, legitimate fifty years ago, has hardened into structural inertia.
Hierarchy no longer serves its purpose, at least not in managing complexity. If anything, it serves to protect the positions of those who occupy it. The result is an architecture designed for stability in a market that rewards speed.

Anatomy of the bottleneck. Where time is lost

Now, pay attention. Decision-making in layered organisations is not uniformly slow. It has specific points where time accumulates, energy dissipates and the value of information decays.
These are those points:

The approval layer that does not decide

Every complex organisation has at least one level that does not decide. It receives, assesses, requests further detail, defers. All because of an outdated culture of caution.

This layer sits in different places in different organisations. Sometimes it is middle management. Sometimes it is the executive committee. Sometimes it is the board. But it is almost always there, and the time information spends in that layer is the main contributor to overall decision latency.

The request for analysis as a substitute for the decision

The most common delaying mechanism is the request for further analysis. A market study. A legal opinion. A competitor comparison. Requests that are not always made in bad faith, but that signal a structure lacking the confidence needed to decide with the information available.

The silo as a defensive structure

Musk named it explicitly in his e-mail. Silos, the barriers that departments build between themselves, are the product of a rational protective dynamic. Opening up to other departments brings risks that are not offset by the evaluation system I answer to.

The result is an organisation in which the information relevant to a decision often fails to reach the person who has to make it, or reaches them only in partial form, after passing through filters that have altered it to protect vested interests.

What organisations that decide quickly do

Decision-making speed does not come from motivation.
The organisations that have solved the latency problem did so structurally, not culturally. If anything, culture follows structure.
Here is how they did it:

Separate decisions by type, not by hierarchical level

The first step is to distinguish reversible decisions from irreversible ones. Jeff Bezos formalised this distinction in his 2016 letter to shareholders, where he calls them Type 1 and Type 2 decisions.

Irreversible decisions, those that require significant resources, change strategic direction or produce consequences that are hard to correct, must be taken with care, broad involvement and in-depth analysis. Reversible decisions, those that can be tested, modified or reversed quickly, must be taken as close to the problem as possible, by the lowest level that has the necessary information.

The most common pathology in layered organisations is applying the process for irreversible decisions to all decisions. The result is a governance system calibrated to manage maximum risk, applied indiscriminately even where risk is minimal and speed is critical.

Direct communication as both a right and an obligation

The most radical lesson of Musk’s e-mail is the obligation.

At Tesla, anyone was not only allowed to communicate directly with anyone else. It was required. Anyone who had a problem and did not look for the fastest way to solve it, bypassing the chain of command when necessary, was violating the company culture.

This distinction is fundamental. Organisations that permit direct communication without requiring it get the same result as those that do not permit it. Because in the organisational culture of any hierarchical structure, permission without obligation is read as theoretical permission. The real incentive remains to follow the chain of command, so as not to risk damaging one’s relationship with one’s manager.

Accountability without oversight

Fast organisations assign clear accountability to specific individuals, not to committees. Accountability shared among four people on a committee is accountability that does not exist. Each committee member can reasonably assume that someone else will answer for the result. The result is that no one answers directly.

Assigning accountability to an individual means exposing that individual to the risk of being visibly wrong. This requires an organisational culture that treats mistakes as information, not as failure. Organisations that punish reversible mistakes disproportionately systematically breed risk aversion at every level, and with it, structural slowness in decision-making.

The problem we see every day, and what we do

At Bliss, our work with organisations often leads to a conversation that begins as a communications or positioning project and opens onto something deeper.
The organisation wants to redefine its positioning. It wants to communicate more coherently. It wants to build a brand identity that holds up over time.
These are all legitimate, high-priority goals. But the moment you analyse the structure that has to deliver that output, the fault line emerges.

The brand has no unified voice because the decisions that shape it pass through five levels of approval, each with its own agenda and its own system of priorities. Communication is not consistent because each touchpoint is managed by a different department that does not talk to the others. Positioning does not hold over time because the ability to respond to market shifts is slowed by a decision-making process that is not designed for speed.

In these cases, Brand Advisory work cannot stop at defining the strategy. It must include a recommendation on the governance structure that makes that strategy executable. The most robust strategy in the world produces no results if the system responsible for executing it takes six months to reach a decision the market required in three weeks.

This is the necessary condition for communication work to create value over time: speed, which allows everything else to work at the moment that matters.

New Connections (FAQ)

Does Musk-style direct communication work in Italy too, or are our companies built differently?

In many medium-sized and large Italian organisations, hierarchical position defines professional identity even before specific expertise does. This changes everything: permission to communicate directly is read as a threat to status, not as an operational opportunity. The resistance is not cultural in the vague sense of the word. It is rational, because it touches something real. The practical consequence is that intervention must start with incentives, not with culture. Changing how people are assessed and rewarded produces cultural change. Announcing that the culture must change without touching incentives produces nothing.

How can you tell whether an organisation decides too slowly? Is there a measure?

The most reliable method is to trace the life cycle of a sample of real decisions: from the moment the problem is identified to the moment someone actually starts solving it. Not from sign-off to execution. From recognising the problem to taking action. In lightly regulated sectors with high competitive dynamism, that cycle should take weeks for operational decisions and months for strategic ones. A reasonable benchmark for a positioning decision in a mid-sized company is between six and twelve weeks. Beyond that threshold, the organisation systematically cedes ground to faster competitors.

Fewer hierarchical layers, always? Or are there situations in which a vertical structure makes sense?

Hierarchy creates value in three specific contexts. First: technically complex operations, where an error at one stage compromises everything that follows. Second: highly regulated environments, where accountability must be formally traceable. Third: very large-scale organisations, where direct communication between all parties is physically impossible. Outside these three contexts, hierarchical structure tends to cost more than it delivers. The recurring problem is that many organisations apply maximum hierarchy to every type of decision, treating each choice as if it were technically complex, high regulatory risk and on a scale impossible to manage without intermediaries. It almost never is.

We want to speed up decisions, but the last reform attempt froze everything for months. How do we start again?

Almost always, sweeping organisational reforms generate resistance precisely because they remove positions of power consolidated over time. The way to manage this resistance is to redirect it, not reduce it. You choose one specific decision: high impact, low technical complexity. You bypass the standard process explicitly and transparently, without slipping it through under the radar. You document the speed and the result. That case becomes the reference point for redefining the process across that entire category of decisions. Working within a defined scope produces less resistance than a reform announced across the board, and produces concrete evidence before it is extended.