News Every Day | 06 May 2024, 15:37

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other tech titans' unconventional management practices

Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook against a yellow background. — L-R: Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, who each have some interesting management practices.
AP Images; Bryan Erickson/BI

Tech titans like Elon Musk and Tim Cook run some of the world's biggest companies.
In so doing, they've employed some outright strange management practices.
From banning PowerPoints to having 50 direct reports, here are tech leaders' most unconventional management habits.

They're some of the best-known CEOs in the world. But while we may know more about their flashy real estate buys and jet-setting habits, we don't have as good a glimpse into how they run their companies behind closed doors.

Here are some of the most notable management quirks from tech's biggest names:

Jeff Bezos

When he was still CEO of Amazon, Bezos employed the "two-pizza rule" to limit teams to only as many people as could be fed with two pizzas.

He also famously banned PowerPoints, instead telling employees to write six-page memos for meetings, which began with attendees silently reading the document.

Elon Musk

Musk, the CEO of companies including Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, has described himself as a "nanomanager." Consistent with that style, Musk doesn't like delegating and last year told Tesla staff he wanted to personally approve all new hires.

Musk also encourages people to leave meetings rather than stay in some cases. In a 2018 email to Tesla staff, he said there should generally be fewer, shorter meetings and wrote, "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value."

He's also said employees can feel free to buck the chain of command to get things done.

"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," he wrote in an email to Tesla staff a few years back. "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."

Mark Zuckerberg

Meta's chief executive also doesn't like to delegate, saying leaders should "make as many decisions and get involved in as many things as you can."

Zuckerberg has also tried to cut back on bloat and made the company flatter during his famous "Year of Efficiency," saying he doesn't like a structure of "managers managing managers."

Zuckerberg also famously likes to wear the same outfit every day to save brainpower for more important decisions.

Jensen Huang

Huang believes CEOs should have the most direct reports of anyone, and it shows.

The Nvidia CEO has a lot of direct reports — 50 to be exact.

And as Nvidia enjoys a boom time as its share price soars amid the AI era, Business Insider first reported that its CEO also awarded employees with a "Jensen special grant" that boosted their stock awards by 25% this year.

Tim Cook

Cook grills employees in meetings to make sure they know their stuff.

As a former Apple employee told Cult of Mac editor Leander Kahney for his 2019 book on Cook, "He'll ask you ten questions. If you answer them right, he'll ask you ten more. If you do this for a year, he'll start asking you nine questions. Get one wrong, and he'll ask you 20 and then 30."

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Larry Page Sergey Brin — Google's cofounders attribute their "20% time" policy with spawning AdSense and Google News.
AP

Google's cofounders implemented the "20% time" policy encouraging employees "to spend 20 percent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google," like a side project besides their usual work, they wrote in 2004.

Page and Brin, in fact, credit the rule with the creation of AdSense and Google News.

Read the original article on Business Insider