Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications, recently said, “Companies rarely become bureaucratic all of a sudden. It happens one unnecessary meeting, one extra approval, one small frustration at a time. Each makes it only 1 or 2% harder to do your job, which is why they’re easy to ignore, but those frictions compound.” She offered this quote in the context of an article about OpenAI's process for identifying "friction" within the company and cutting through the bureaucracy to eliminate these pain points. Fortune's Emily Forlini explains:
At OpenAI, a special process—and a magic word—helps employees instantly cut through layers of bureaucracy and clear bottlenecks slowing things down. It’s called “friction.” And it has the power to supersede just about anything a team is doing, often carrying the force of CEO Sam Altman or President Greg Brockman with it. The process starts when someone emails a special friction@ address to report an internal bottleneck. The issues range from a technical system that isn’t working, a process that’s not having the intended result, or office-related frustrations, such as there not being enough IT vending machines. OpenAI’s leadership team triages the emails sent to friction@, moving forward with ones they deem worthy. To help alleviate full parking lots, for example, the company started a pilot to prioritize spots for those with long commutes. Another time, employees asked for a better process to grant API credits reliably and at scale. If the matter is considered important enough, Altman or Brockman will get involved to ensure it’s resolved.
A former OpenAI employee who spoke to Fortune praised the friction system as an effective way for leadership to get ground-level feedback. The process helps teams keep moving forward, tackling issues before they can fester, the person said. That’s especially important as OpenAI’s headcount grows to more than 8,000 employees expected by the end of this year, with offices across the U.S. and the globe. “It’s a good thing—literally anybody can complain about big company bullsh*t directly to Sam and they can act on it,” the former employee said. “If you want to ruthlessly cut through bureaucracy, you have to be ruthless about it.”
The process reminded me of the fantastic book, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, by Stanford Professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao. Perhaps Altman and Simo read the book and built this process in light of those insights about eliminating friction. One word of caution though - Forlini writes in the article that some employees have complained about the tremendous burden and pressure it puts on people to drop everything and address an issue that has suddenly been escalated to Altman and Simo. As always, balance and moderation is critical. You want a process for cutting through bureaucracy, but you don't want it to become abused by those annoyed at small inconveniences, or by those trying to reallocate resources to their pet projects or ideas.
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