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On Saturday afternoon, Elon Musk posted a message on X stating that “all federal employees will soon be receiving an email asking them to tell us what they did last week.” He added that ignoring the request could result in their termination. Within hours, an email from the Office of Personnel Management appeared in the inboxes of millions of federal employees with the subject line “What did you do last week?” The email began with a request: “Please respond to this email with about five bullet points about what you did last week and cc your manager.” The deadline for completing the task was set for Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET. Shortly before Musk took control of Twitter in 2022, he asked Parag Agrawal, then the platform’s CEO, a similar question. Agrawal was fired shortly thereafter. It seemed then that the same dismissive attention would now be directed at the entire federal government. However, this plan soon began to fall apart.
Later that evening, Musk clarified OPM’s request in a series of posts on X, noting, “The passing grade is actually very low: ‘Can you send an email with text that makes some sense?’” he wrote at 10:36 p.m. “To be clear, the bar is extremely low here,” he added ten minutes later. “An email with a few bullet points that make some sense is perfectly acceptable!” The next morning, he hinted that the real purpose of the email request might have been to detect fraud: “We believe that non-existent persons or deceased people may be used to collect paychecks.”
At the same time, some Trump-appointed agency leaders began openly advising their employees to ignore the request. “The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is responsible for all of our vetting processes,” Kash Patel, the newly confirmed FBI director, wrote in an email to his staff. “At this time, please hold off on any responses.” Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of national intelligence, also gave her charges similar instructions, citing the “inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work.” By Monday morning, employees at many agencies, including the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security, had been instructed not to respond, pending further instructions. Later that day, OPM announced that responding to the email was voluntary.
From Musk’s perspective, the turmoil surrounding this rushed order is less important. As with many recent moves by his Department of Government Efficiency, what matters is the message it sends: Musk wants to be seen as a productivity Prometheus, bringing Silicon Valley efficiency to the federal government’s cumbersome operations. If that effort fails, it will be further evidence of the entrenched nature of the bureaucracy he is battling.
The problem with this heroic mythology is that it’s based on a flawed premise. Musk wants the world to believe that the dynamic tech sector has already found the secrets to boosting productivity for knowledge workers. But if that’s true, why did Twitter descend into chaos shortly after Musk arrived, when he introduced and then repealed several employee review schemes before suddenly firing half its workforce with no further explanation? As it turns out, the central question in Saturday’s OPM letter—what do employees actually do?—is one that Silicon Valley has been grappling with since its earliest days.
In the 1940s, a young academic named Peter Drucker was invited to study the operations of General Motors, then the largest corporation in the world. It was a good time for Drucker, because GM was looking for ways to improve productivity. The company knew how to run its automobile factories. Following methods perfected by Henry Ford earlier in the century, it had broken down the process of assembling a car into small steps—like attaching a steering wheel or winding a magneto wire—that could then be handed off to assembly-line workers. Managing productivity in this context was simple: measure the speed at which people completed their clearly defined tasks.
Managing GM's offices proved a far more complex task. The new class of office workers who populated GM's growing administrative apparatus juggled complex project portfolios with ever-changing demands. There was no single best way to tell them how to perform their daily tasks, and no equivalent of a growing stack of steering wheels or magnetos to demonstrate how productive they were.
Against this backdrop, GM’s famed CEO, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., began developing a radical new approach to management: focusing on results rather than processes. Drucker recalls Sloan explaining that a successful manager in this new environment “must be extremely tolerant and not pay attention to the method of doing things.” Instead, it’s better to set clear goals and then check later to see if they’ve been met. Drucker took these ideas and eventually developed them into his influential 1954 book, The Practice of Management, employing a strategy he called “management by objectives.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
