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Elon Musk explains his 5-step process for running companies:
"First, make your requirements less dumb.
Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you.
It's particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough. Everyone's wrong no matter who you are.
Everyone's wrong some of the time. So make your requirements less dumb. Then try very hard to delete the part or process.
This is actually very important. If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you are not deleting enough.
The bias tends to be very strongly towards let's add this part or process step in case we need it.
But you can basically make in-case arguments for so many things and for a rocket that is trying to be the first fully reusable rocket.
There's never been a fully reusable rocket. People don't understand.
This is like the holy grail of rocketry. So you've got to delete the part or process step. Super important.
You can't hedge your bets. That's why the grid funds, for example, do not fall down because that's a whole extra mechanism that we don't need.
Also, whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department.
Because you can't ask the department. You have to ask a person. That person who's putting forward their requirement or constraint must agree that they must take responsibility for that requirement.
Otherwise, you can have a requirement that basically an intern two years ago randomly came up with off the cuff and they're not even at the company anymore.
These things are often just way more silly than you think. So step one, make your requirements less dumb.
Step two, delete the part or process step.
If you're not adding things back in 10% of the time, you're clearly not deleting enough.
And then only the third step is simplify or optimize.
The third step, not the first step. The reason it's the third step is because possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.
Everyone's been trained in high school and college that you've got to answer the question.
Convergent logic. So you can't tell the professor your question is dumb. You'll get a bad grade.
You have to answer the question. So everyone's basically, without knowing it, they've got a mental straitjacket on.
They'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist.
And then finally, you get to step four, which is accelerate cycle time.
You're moving too slowly, go faster.
But don't go faster until you have worked on the other three things first.
You can always make things go faster.
And then the final step is automate.
Now, I've personally made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps multiple times.
Literally, I automated, accelerated, simplified, and then deleted.
One example I've talked about before is there were these fiberglass mats on top of the Model 3 battery pack that were in between the floor pan and the battery.
And it was at one point choking the battery pack production line.
And I was basically living on the battery pack production line trying to fix the line.
It was choking the entire Model 3 production program. So the first mistake was I tried to fix the automation, like make the robot better.
So automating was a mistake. Then accelerating was a mistake. Then optimizing was a mistake.
And finally, I said, what the hell are these mats for?
And I asked the battery safety team, what are these mats for?
Are they for fire protection or something?
They said, no, they're for noise and vibration.
Then I asked an NVH, a noise, vibration, harshness team, what's it for? They said fire safety.
So literally, it was like being in a Dilbert cartoon.
Actually, I feel like I'm in a Dilbert cartoon quite frequently.
So then finally, OK, great, let's try a car with the fiberglass mats and without.
And they put a microphone to both and see if you can tell the difference.
In fact, I was like, which one is which?
So we just deleted them and just bypassed this $2 million robot cell.
It was just a complete pile of nonsense."
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