In practice, each org has a top5 mailing list to which employees send weekly updates. Jensen samples from these mailing lists.

Who can read the mails sent to each org's top5 mailing list? Can ICs subscribe?

everyone in the org can read them. One can also subscribe to other org's mailing lists.

Awesome.

I'm a software guy who for 1.5 years worked for a hardware company with a relatively strict upwards-only information reporting structure. It wasn't even for secrecy, it's just that they didn't understand the concept of collaboration at all.

Never again. Went back to the more sane software world after that experience.

It felt quite soul-crushing after a busy week to have to spend mental efforts writing up a report every week to someone two levels up... especially if you have no idea if it was ever read. If colleagues could consume and learn from this effort it would make a lot more sense.

Thank you for the articulation of the issue and your experience dealing with it. Were you aware of the articulated issue (the absence of collaboration) while you were there? Or did it only become clear in retrospect? I imagine in an environment like this it would be easy to get lost in the feeling of being undervalued and disrespected, without being clear of the source/cause of that feeling (unhealthy organizational culture).

Thanks for the interest but no.

> It felt quite soul-crushing after a busy week to have to spend mental efforts writing up a report to someone 1-3 levels up... especially if you had no idea if it was ever read.

There are ways to test that.

You could just not submit the report, and see if anybody complains.

Or prepare the report, but intentionally corrupt the file before submitting it, and see if anybody complains.

Or prepare the report, and in it ask if anyone is actually reading it, and ask that they contact you if they are.

I needed to submit a .pptx file with 1 or more slides that my manager would manually insert into his weekly presentation deck to the exec team.

I admit I never had the guts to submit a slide which asked if anyone was reading it. It did cross my mind.

(It was a Microsoft-by-default-company, as many small hardware/research-oriented companies often are, I guess.

There was also that one week epic fight needed to get approval to run MacOS/Linux in the new "software department".)

Yeah, but it works if someone reads and cares.

> - Doesn't use status updates because he believes they are too refined by the time they get to him. They are not ground truth anymore.

Facts. I worked in a place where one my primary work outputs was a weekly high-stakes status document, and boy this document was refined, and agonized over, and wordsmithed, and revised, and re-revised, and softened, and distilled, and lenghtened, and shortened, until it was precisely the exact narrative that the VP and SVP needed to hear. By the time it went through the hands of dozens of engineering managers and was submitted, it was far, far divorced from reality. Then, rinse and repeat next week. I don't know if/how leadership had a clue what was really happening.