Why Musk Succeeds

 2021.06.02 - Ian Page

It was described as follows...

Musk and his people are in the engineering shop. His competitors are in PowerPoint.

The point being that engineers proceed by making prototypes and breaking them quickly. A prototype is expected to break and hopefully you learn something from it. Planning so there is no risk takes a long time and doesn't find innovative solutions, just safe ones.

Musk's space company has a fast production line for spaceships in the expectation that several of them will blow up before they work out how to do things. Since they are going to blow up there's no need to overbuild them.

One of his cars went through 5 prototyping cycles in a year.

The H1 approach requires that managers avoid risk and forces proposals to conform to structures defined for incremental programs.

We are in a time when incredible changes are needed in a very short time.

Careful planning to eliminate risk is going to slow us down and probably cost more.

It's a time for entrepreneurs and engineers and a break it fast break and often attitude. In the end it saves money.


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