Watch the full
interview with Elon Musk here:
Starbase Tour with Elon Musk [PART 1 // Summer 2021]
Everyday Astronaut
Elon Musk explains his 5-step algorithm for running companies
“First, make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb… It’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough.”
In this interview at Starbase, Elon elaborates on his methodology for shipping everything from electric cars to rockets.
Here’s his “algorithm” quoted in full from the Walter Isaacson biography:
1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.
Additionally, Musk restated that he believes everyone should be a chief engineer. Engineers need to understand the system at a high level to understand when they are making a bad optimization. As an example, Musk noted that an order of magnitude more time has been spent reducing engine mass than reducing residual propellant, despite both being equally as important.
Elon shares a costly example of doing this process in reverse on the Tesla Model 3 production line and optimizing a part that didn’t even need to exist.
“It’s possibly the most common error of a smart engineer to optimize a thing that should not exist. Everyone’s been trained in high school and college that you answer the question — convergent logic. You can’t tell the professor your question is dumb or you’ll get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone, without knowing, basically has this mental straight jacket on and they’ll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist.”
To summarise:
1) Make the requirements less dumb.(Every requirement should have a owner)
2) Delete any part or process you can. (Don’t build for incase)
3) Optimize. (Don’t optimize a part or a process that should not exist. For those DELETE.)
4) Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be sped up.
5) Automate. (This should comes last. First Delete , optimise & Accelerate)
Marc Andreessen on what makes Elon impossible to compete with
“I’m not aware of another CEO who operates the way he does.”
Marc believes you have to go back in history to the industrialists of the late 1800s and early 1900s to find founders comparable to Elon Musk (e.g. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Watson, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt).
“Those guys ran very similar to the way Elon runs things… The top line thing is just this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does, to be completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it, and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work to deeply understand the issues. And then be the lead problem solver in the organization. Basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies, identifies the biggest problem the company’s having that week and he fixes it. He does that every week for 52 weeks in a row and then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year.”
Marc juxtaposes this process with more conventional CEOs who respond to problems with planning, meetings, and reports.
The other crucial factor in Elon’s success that Marc points to is his ability to attract incredible talent:
“Many of the best people in the world want to work with him because if you work with Elon the expectations are through the roof in terms of your level of performance. And he is going to know who you are and what you’ve done. He’s going to know what you’ve done this week and if you’re underperforming. And he may fire you in the meeting if you’re not carrying your weight. But if you are as committed to the company as he is, and hard working and capable, many people who have worked for him say that they had the best experience of their lives.”
Marc recalls a famous line from somebody who joined SpaceX from another aerospace company and said, “It’s like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence. Everybody around me is so absolutely competent.”
And lastly, as Marc argues, Elon’s technical ability is another competitive advantage versus non-technical CEOs:
“When he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck… He’s not asking the VP of Engineering to ask the Director of Engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report that’s to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn’t do that. What he does is he goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing, and then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them. And again, this is why he inspires such incredible loyalty from especially the technical people who he works with. They’re just like, ‘Wow, if I’m up against a problem I don’t know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream and he’s going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line and help me figure this out.’”
Video source:
@Erdayastronaut
(2021)
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