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Please look past the reasons you have described. What Elon is saying is that he will personally meet the injured workers and hear from them what happened with t

Please look past the reasons you have described. What Elon is saying is that he will personally meet the injured workers and hear from them what happened with the process and why the injury happened. Then he'd go back to the process by performing it himself and find the root cause. He will then make sure that these processes are improved so no such incidents happen again. I read similar stuff in The Toyota Way book where workers kept complaining to the management about poor manufacturing processes leading to the injury and poor quality incidents and then the management made sure these processes are constantly improved (Kaizen).

gist 9y ago
> Then he'd go back to the process by performing it himself and find the root cause. Right. That is what I am calling out. The fact that he will do this is ludicrous and certainly not anywhere near the best use of his time. We are not talking about a small mom and pop or lean startup with limited resources. > and then the management made sure these processes The CEO of Toyota? Almost certainly not. Undercover boss type things or spending a few hours in a call center or store or anywhere to get a seat of the pants feel for things? Sure.
- hwillis 9y ago
  In both Tesla and SpaceX it's part of the culture that safety worries are elevated to very high levels very quickly. There was one guy (vet, nontechnical something or other) in SpaceX who was fired for abusing this, but what struck me most about the story was how he was in repeated contact with the technical person directly under Musk before he went directly to Musk himself. It seemed like that had all been fine, and he was only fired after refusing to let it go with Musk (plus IIRC he was basically out of his depth with the issue). Musk is ultraproductive and works very closely with his employees. Tesla only has two factories; it's on a much more manageable scale than something like Toyota.

gist 9y ago

> Then he'd go back to the process by performing it himself and find the root cause. Right. That is what I am calling out. The fact that he will do this is ludicrous and certainly not anywhere near the best use of his time. We are not talking about a small mom and pop or lean startup with limited resources. > and then the management made sure these processes The CEO of Toyota? Almost certainly not. Undercover boss type things or spending a few hours in a call center or store or anywhere to get a seat of the pants feel for things? Sure.

hwillis 9y ago
In both Tesla and SpaceX it's part of the culture that safety worries are elevated to very high levels very quickly. There was one guy (vet, nontechnical something or other) in SpaceX who was fired for abusing this, but what struck me most about the story was how he was in repeated contact with the technical person directly under Musk before he went directly to Musk himself. It seemed like that had all been fine, and he was only fired after refusing to let it go with Musk (plus IIRC he was basically out of his depth with the issue). Musk is ultraproductive and works very closely with his employees. Tesla only has two factories; it's on a much more manageable scale than something like Toyota.