Musk 5 Steps Productivity and Thought on How to Become less Dumb and Delete enough
Step 1 — Make Requirement less Dumb
“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.”
Step 2 — Deleting it
“You may have to add [processes] back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.”
Thought on Step 1 & 2 : How to Become less Dumb and Delete enough
Literally delete it or replace it with something else that have the same result.
For example,
- You buy the ready meal so that you don’t have to cook at home.
- You don’t own a lot of thing so that you can let go the maintenance cost and upfront when you don’t need it.
- You buy the ready made software so that you don’t have to build something ground up.
- You use parts / services from the other company, so that you only have to do the integration.
- You outsource the service so that you don’t have fixed cost and management headache.
- You don’t provide tons of service so that you can focus then make the same or more revenue.
- You don’t support range of devices / customers so that you can have more time on the important segment.
Step 3 — Simplify and optimize
“A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.”
Step 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.”
The key here is “Cycle”.
The process is simplify and optimized into something you can do “Repeatedly” called “Cycle”.
Only if the process is structured enough, it can be accelerated like cycling left, right, left, right …
Simple enough to delegated to someone without much context.
Optimized enough to have only few “Structured” steps
Step 5 — Automate
“Automate comes last. The big mistake 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.”