How is your company going to keep up with “Tesla Speed”?

Tesla and SpaceX are out-innovating the competition. How are they doing it? How are you going to catch up? I just spent two days with Joe Justice, the TEDx speaker and pioneer of Extreme Manufacturing, and he shared how they work. Here is a five-minute introduction to how they work. Welcome to start of new series of the Agile Minute.

Much of their approach can be summed up in 8 principles:

1. Agile DNA – Small teams, simple rules of the road.
2. Data driven in Real-time – Identify the limiting KPIs, optimize till they are not a problem anymore.
3. Growth over profit – move decisions to the value zone.
4. Contract for Innovation. Emphasize collaboration and product improvement in your contracts. Limit contracts to one page!
5. Swarm on Problems in Small Teams. And use home-grown AI as an accelerator!
6. Digital self-management eliminates the bottle neck of management and even Agile Management!
7. Optimize for change – rather than low unit cost of production(!)
8. Self-management with Open-Space Style Planning – every day you come to work, look at the AI to see what work would be valuable, and decide what to work on. Anybody can propose new work items to improve the key KPIs.

Thanks to this approach, every day the product gets a little bit better. On the Model 3, Tesla has been able to reduce their cost of production by 30% since its introduction, while improving range, performance, and quality.

I am really excited about this. I am looking for companies who are doing similar things. I’d love to talk to people at Tesla, SpaceX, or other Musk companies to find out how they make this work in real life.

For the rest of us, the questions is, “How do we do this if we are not Elon Musk? Or perhaps more importantly, “How do we start if we our not starting our company from scratch?”

Are you interested in learning from Musk companies? Should I do more content and video on this theme? Let me know in the comments. And if you have experience worth sharing, I’d love to talk to you for a new book I am working on

P.S.