Whether at Tesla or SpaceX, at all production meetings, Musk seizes the opportunity to chant what he calls the "five-step method" like a mantra.
He did this because the "production surge" operation of the Nevada and Fremont factories put him through extremely difficult trials and shed a layer of skin on his whole person, so he wanted to pass on his experience to more people.
"Every time I talk about the five-step method, I'm like an old monk chanting," Mr. Musk said, "but I think it's good to grind people's ears out of the cocoon." "The working method consists of five major steps:
1. Question every request. When any request is made, the person making the request should be attached. Never accept a request from a department, such as "Legal" or "Security". You must know the name of the person making this request. Next you should question it, no matter how smart the person is. It is the demands made by smart people that are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. This thing has to be done forever, even if the request comes from me Musk himself. After questioning, everyone needs to improve the requirement to make it less stupid.
2. Delete all the parts and processes in the request that you can remove, although you may have to add them back. In fact, if you end up adding less than 10% of the deleted part, you haven't cut enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should be placed after the second step, because a common mistake people make is to simplify and optimize a part or process that shouldn't exist in the first place.
4. Speed up turnaround time. Every process can be expedited, but it can only be done after the first three steps have been followed. At the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of energy on speeding up the production process, only to realize later that some processes should have been taken out in the first place.
5. Automation. One of the big mistakes I made at the Nevada and Fremont plants was that I was trying to automate every step in the first place. We should have questioned all the requirements, removed unnecessary parts and processes, screened out the problems, dealt with them, and then moved forward with automation.
This approach sometimes leads to a number of inferences, including:
- All technical managers must have practical experience, for example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time programming, and managers of solar rooftop businesses must spend time doing installation work on rooftops. Otherwise, they are like cavalry captains who can't ride horses, generals who can't wield knives and guns.
- "Hello, hello, hello everyone" is dangerous and causes people to stop questioning the work of their colleagues. There is a natural tendency to not want to kick a good colleague off the boat, and this dangerous tendency must be avoided.
- It's okay to make mistakes, but it's okay if you don't bow your head if you're wrong. Never ask your team to do something you wouldn't want to do yourself.
- Whenever there's a problem that needs to be solved, don't just talk to the person in charge you directly manage. In-depth research requires cross-level communication, to communicate directly with your subordinates.
- Recruit people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught, but it is too difficult to change a person's work attitude, and he has to "change his brain".
- A crazy sense of urgency is the law of our company's operations. The only rules to be followed are those that can be derived from the laws of physics, and everything else is just advice.
Excerpt from | "Leadership Digest" June 2024
Manuscript source | Elon Musk Biography
The author of this article | Walter Isaacson, Sun Siyuan, Liu Jiaqi/Translation
Editor-in-Charge | Young
WeChat edit | Late note