I Love Elon Musk's People Are Vector Analogy
Photographer: Alex Kotliarskyi | Source: Unsplash Photographer: Alex Kotliarskyi | Source: Unsplash I recently heard about Elon Musk's People are Vector Analogy on a presentation by Dharmesh Shah (Hubspot's cofounder), where he talks about a personal interaction with Elon Musk. Elon explained to him the best way to optimize your team is to think of each employee as a vector. I thought it was a perfect illustration to demonstrate the difficult task every CEO has of overseeing employees. But first, a quick physics review of what a vector is. A vector is a given quantity that has two properties, magnitude and direction. Suppose you have ten employees or vectors for this analogy, and each is going in a different direction. In that case, your company will not be as productive if all your employees go in the same direction. So the trick is to get each of your employees or vectors going in the same direction because then you can add up each of their magnitudes to get the sum of y...