Licencier 80% des Employés : la Méthode Elon Musk Inspire

Good evening, my friends. You know, in recent years, we've been talking about the Elon Musk phenomenon. When we talk about social plans, when we talk about what we commonly call mass layoffs, we say that Elon Musk is the one who inspired what's happening. Because, look, when he acquired Twitter, what was formerly called Twitter, which is now called X, he arrived, and quite quickly, practically from day one, he started laying people off. So he started firing people, executives, employees, managers. In fact, everyone was affected throughout the organization. So even though in reality, when a company gets bought out, it's almost normal, you'll see in all buyouts, there are lots of people who either leave on their own or, or are pushed out or are laid off outright. But it's quite rare to see 80% of employees laid off. So it can happen. You can even see 100% of employees laid off. But that's in special cases. For example, sometimes you have a buyout, but it's with the aim of dismantling the company. For example, a company that has interesting ip, what we call interesting intellectual property, for example, it has inventions, it has patents, it has a nice customer base, good technology. On the other hand, it doesn't interest us because that's all we're interested in, because the rest is redundant. We don't care. So what can happen? Sometimes you have the company that is bought out, and then the people are victimized, right? Everyone leaves and is thrown out, and then you only keep what I just told you. That's not the case. You don't fire 80% of the people when you buy a company to continue and develop the business even further. And so that's what was surprising about Elon Musk, who was completely paradoxical. So, on the one hand, he didn't buy Twitter to close it down, he bought it to keep it. But what did he do? He fired 80% of the people. So that shocked people. Of course. That shocked people. Of course. He was heavily criticized by the media. In any case, the media criticized him more for political reasons than for having fired 80% of the people just because they don't like his political stance, which is rather right wing. So let's continue. Trump started with the idea that we have what is called the 8020 or the 20 80. It's a rule that is verified all the time. For example, you can look at your clients. I had a small company that I managed for a while, and I can tell you that 80% of my income came from 20% of my clients. Roughly speaking, we can't say it's to the nearest percent. But roughly speaking, what I'm telling you is that there is a minority, the fifth of my clients who bring me 80% of my income. At the same time, if I were to look at the level of hassles, the problems, it's the same. 20% of my clients cause me 80% of support tickets. 80. 80% of complaints, 80% of crazy requests, 80% of annoyance. You understand? So there's always that. And in a company, unfortunately, it's the same in a company, you'll find that if you join a company, you'll find that generally 20% of the people do 80% of the work, and the rest, well, there you go. He complains, by the way, in your traditional company, the 20% who are, let's say, the cutting edge of the blade, who really do the work, end up burning out, never getting promoted, end up being broke, end up becoming disillusioned, and end up leaving the company. That's what happens in a traditional company. You should never give up on being part of the 20%, but rather part of the 80%. Okay, now that we're talking about Ahter, he used this principle and said to himself that 20% of people produce 80% of the work. Well, I'll keep that. I'll fire. The rest. I'm ready to accept, because the 80% that I'm going to get rid of ultimately only represented 20% of the value, 20% of the initiative, 20% of the work. So if I get rid of all these people, I'm going to see barely a slight drop in activity, but not even that. Let me give you another example. When I was a student, I had a friend who worked for a railroad company. They were installing railroad tracks. They were installing railroad lines. So the guys, just guys would stand in a big line there, in wire on each side of a rail, and they had a tool. Then they had to lift the rail by hand to place it on the railroad ties. And then it was welded and everything, but they had to lift it by hand to place it. Okay, there are machines that do this very well today, but there are still construction sites where people work by hand. Well, he told me that they noticed on that site, on that job, that there are three types of guys. You have the guy who lifts, and this friend of mine was one of them. He's someone who really takes his job seriously, passionately. He wants to do it. He has a work ethic. He lifts the rail all the way until his back hurts. You have the other guy who doesn't lift. He'll hold the tool like this and then there you have it. He doesn't lift at all. He doesn't put any force into it. And that guy, very often, he's the one who makes the most noise. He's the one who makes the most noise because of the effort. We have the same thing in companies. And then there's the third guy who's even worse. And here we'll come back to Elon Musk. The third one is the one who is exhausted. He comes in the morning already tired, unmotivated, doesn't feel like working. He's just there killing time until the end of the day so that the foreman can sign. And then he goes to the office to get his money. Well, this one, he leans on the rail and you have to not only lift the rail, but lift him too. That means he has a negative added value. He has no added value. He is negative that he has had a loss of value. Let's say that his presence means that the work becomes more difficult. The work becomes more difficult. We all collectively progress more slowly. We have that in the corporate world. So what does that mean? It means that in. I noticed something in passing in the holidays. I noticed when I started booking holidays, it has nothing to do with this channel, but I'll tell you something that I noticed. I'll share with you. I was booking my vacation and I could choose the number of days. So here I was, I put me, my wife, my daughter, here's what next. You click like that. And he said, how long you wanted to stay? So I think I chose eight days. Eight days. He offered me a price. There you go. Eight days costs a lot of money. Then I said to myself, I was looking at the calendar, here we are staying one more night. So I clicked nine days. And my friends, do you know what happened? The price went down. The price went down. Wow. Then I put 10 days. The price goes up a little. After 11 days it goes up a lot. 12 days, it goes down again. There's a non equal number of things. So I'm just telling you, just between us, do your tests, do your tests, because this can make a huge difference. So Elon Musk actually noticed that in the 80% that he comes, there aren't just people who do nothing, like this guy who's just hanging around the rail. There are those who have a negative impact. I'm thinking for example of toxic people, People who are there just to cause trouble. People who are there to justify their work. For example, people who can click on Outlook, create a meeting, invite a bunch of people who have no business being there, make attendance mandatory, and then you have to abandon a multi million dollar client to come and that's it. Spend time in a meeting, you don't even know what you're doing there. A meeting that serves no purpose, but is just justifying the existence of a certain number of people. So it's in effect, you see, it's a loss of value, it's negative. So he fired all these people. We predicted the collapse or the collapse of Twitter? Well, no, Twitter continued to operate. He added a bunch of features, artificial intelligence, subscriptions stuff, long form video, all that. So wow, okay, it works. So in the circles of business leaders, even if many don't say it, won't say it because, well, Elon M is right wing, it's all crap. So we prefer not to talk about it. But on the other hand, without experience somewhere, they say to themselves, it's time all the bosses look at their files. They look at how much it costs to run their companies. And among the highest costs is the human cost, the cost of having people to pay them a salary, pay them vacations, pay insurance, pay contributions, pay managers who manage them, all that. So they say to themselves, if I can get rid of 80%, that's great. If I said 1,000 employees, can I operate with 2,000? If I have 1,000 employees, can't I operate with 200? So that's kind of the idea. Now there is indeed this experience of Twitter or Elon Musk that has made this fantasy a reality, has given it substance. Now there is a problem. Let me tell you. I'm going to tell you something about aviation. You know, I always leave and I come back. It's a bit like my African spirit. If you want, I'll tell you a story. In airplanes, in airliners, if you look at the large carriers of the 80s and 70s, take the 747,200, for example, take the DC10, take the Boeing 707. What did these planes have in common? Even the Airbus 300, the first Airbus, the first Airbus, what did they have in common? Well, in the cockpit of those planes, there were three people. There were three people. There was a captain, there was a co pilot, and there was the flight engineer, Leeman. So there were three people, it was flown by three people. And the, in the, in the, what we call the amane. Well, he had a console, he controlled the engines, he controlled the fuel, he controlled the pressurization, the air conditioning. He had all the Alarms, lots of things during takeoff. The one who turned his seat was leaning over the throttles to display the takeoff power. All that. So he had a real job. Today we have the Airbus 380, the Boeing 747,400, the Boeing 77. What is it about them that is so coma? Well, there are only two men in corpit. There are only two men. There are two people. More and more women are doing this job. We have a captain who can be a man or a woman, and a first officer or co pilot. There is no longer the O. But then, watch out, watch out, my friends. We have removed the O, but we have also removed his job. There is no longer his console. We are not asking, you know, because if. If we had acted a bit like some companies do, which is what we would have done, we would have removed the flight engineer, his instrument panel, and we would be expected that regularly during the flight we would have the captain or the co pilot or an air husser or whoever running around and going to his console, who will start tinkering, who will start doing his job. No, it didn't happen like that in aviation. The flight engineer was eliminated and his job was also eliminated, which was largely automated electronic systems and all that were installed, and computer systems that allowed him to be replaced while simplifying things. For example, we created much simpler engines with systems, I won't say artificial intelligence. There isn't any. These are more intelligent systems that make them easier to manage, to perform many tasks automatically, and so on. So there you have it. When you started an engine on one of the first 747s, you had to have your watch click, press several buttons in sequence, follow the needles, then bam. Let go, let go. You see the juice, you see the fuel thingamajig. That was all today, a simple button. And there's a sequence, right? There's a sequence that happens all by itself, that starts the engine, and if it detects a problem, it stops all by itself too. You see, they changed that. Now let's go back to the idea that in aviation we've eliminated a third of the technical crew who are in the cockpit, but we've kept 2/3. But at the same time, we've changed the way of working. That's what Elon Musk did. Yes, he fired 80% of the people. But the remaining 20% don't spend their day in useless meetings. They don't spend their day doing training or HR training that they're sent and told it's mandatory. You have to hand it in today, that doesn't happen. There's no such thing as wasted time. There's no such thing as useless stuff. There aren't a bunch of guys in a meeting who are there and then they're all on mute. We can't see their video. They're just there killing time. Some are cooking, some are playing on their iPhone, some are on the phone with a client or friends or whatever. Some are sleeping in their bed. That's not the case, however, in today's campaigns, what they are doing, and this is what I find to be the biggest mistake, the biggest mistake is that they say to themselves, we can all become Elon Musk. But not everyone can be Elon Musk. That means that personally, I'm not one of Lal Mosque's admirers. That's not it. But I observe what he does. There are things he does that are good things. I don't agree with him on all that, but what I'm trying to say is that Elon is not what he wants. They have cut more and more staff. There are some who have the 20%, 30%, 40%, but they don't change the way of working. They don't change the tools. And very often they even fire the wrong people. That means they're going to hit, you know, they're going to keep those who are involved in politics. They're going to say, oh, that one, that one is good. He works well. They melt. If we go back to the example of the rail, he can confuse between the one who pretends, oh, it's that heavy, and the one who really works silently, huh? The one who lifts the rail, who is really in pain, who really gives his energy. He doesn't see it. And besides, that's the one he would fire in a company. That's not what happened with Elon M. Because at Exertoard, if he had fired the bad 80%, or if you look at it from another angle, if he had kept the bad 20%, the campaign would have been closed a long time ago. We agree that he chose the 20% that he kept. Well, he kept the most efficient people, the most motivated, the ones who deliver value. That means he kept the people who are nipped in the bud in traditional companies, the people who are pushed towards burnout, the people who are pushed out the door, people who are never promoted, people who are considered the kingpins and asked to keep quiet. Okay, he kept these people. These are the people he put in place. And many of these people were very happy when they saw the toxic people on their backs when they had these useless managers who manage their teams using Excel and then who go from one office to another acting all important. When they see these people getting fired, their passion and motivation for their work for the company will multiply by 10. Clearly, they will say to okay, good riddance, now let me work. Because it's happened to all of us to be in a company and frankly, you have people, they don't want you to work. You have people, they are there. It seems like. It seems like their goal in life or that they are paid to prevent others from working in de facto. That's what they do. So here's the idea. The summary really is that he's trying to imitate the Elon Musk system, but he doesn't imitate it all the way. Well, that's the idea. The worst part is that systems, if you like, all have a kind of internal coherence. You can't take one part of a system and leave the other. So if we decide to go the Elon Musk way, let's go all the way. We'll fire 80% of the people, but then we'll radically revolutionize the way we work. And in particular, Wheel fire meetings. We'll fire PowerPoint presentations with 700, 800, 900 slides that last three days with someone clicking and clicking and people sleeping. We'll fire all that. Except that companies have developed an addiction to it. They can't fire it. So in the end, what are they going to do? They'll get ruined. They'll end up with half the people and then, well, half of the people are coming. What's going to happen with performance? Well, it's going to be divided by 10, simply because in part they've fired people who are important and in part their bad way of working is going to be more and more visible this time. Thank you, my friends, for watching this video. But I think that for most companies, the way we work is completely unattainable. There you go. Thank you. See you soon.