Time to Call Out All Command&Control

“Have a productive day!” was how one of the Severance bosses used to end conversations and their thunderous expression dripping with contempt and cutting tone made it into both an insult and a menace. It’s unimaginable that adults could be treated that way by their employers, right? Purely fiction, yes? Not even close to reality, right?

That same undertone of disdain exuded from every word of the now infamous Elon emails. My last two articles on the Chasing Psychological Safety newsletter ("HumanDebt™ by Elon Musk" and "Elon - the New King of Command&Controllers") go to great pains analysing what in the world has happened to allow such enormity to come out of his head/desk. But beyond what he was thinking - whether he’s veering towards a dictatorship-level cult of personality or that was just an ill-advised PR stunt, he doesn’t matter at all. What matters, is how this reverberated in the tech community.

I’m singling out our community because it is the tech side of Tesla he’s asking to come back, don’t let yourself be deceived by the “but it’s a factory FFS, people have to be there” because his emails were never about floor workers. And best I can understand, they aren’t even about the line managers of those people on the physical floor, as whoever was seen as an essential worker was out and about all the while, he doesn't have some foremen or assembly line managers who are eating cheese in protracted Boris-like trips to the fridge that he's asking to come back. He's simply choosing the ignore any of the progress we have collectively made as humans when we realised it isn't about clocking in and our but about producing awesome outcomes from wherever.

You’d expect everyone on LI would be up in arms in the same fashion upon hearing about this after the years we have just had and being in the same VUCA reality but they are not, are they? And that’s truly disheartening and needs dissection because I believe that this moment could be one of the ones we will long hold as pivotal in retrospect if we go to see how the future of work panned out in 10 or 15 years.

History books will either cite it as: “May 2022 - Elon Musk demands his workers are in the office 40 hours and orders them back in or else. - This caused some uproar but society was collectively over the unsubstantiated “can’t do remote and still win” rhetoric and consequently people just rolled their eyes realising no “visionary” is intangible or always right and took no notice of his internal choices.”; or