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When your company is a tiny player, needing bailouts is largely irrelevant. Tesla didn't have anything like the risk and exposure which required the bailouts.

by rleigh 8y ago

When your company is a tiny player, needing bailouts is largely irrelevant. Tesla didn't have anything like the risk and exposure which required the bailouts. Most of the major manufacturers didn't require bailouts either… Your comments regarding being "made with love" doesn't square with all the other articles I've read recently regarding the poor fit and finish of new Teslas. They are having problems scaling up, and it looks like quality took a hit as a result. Running a large scale industrial manufacturing operation means extensive delegation. Those "metric-focussed" executives actually have an important role to play at this scale. Product design and engineering happen well before scaling up for production. The production side is all about supply chains, efficient assembly and QA. No one should be changing the design at that point; however talented Musk might be as an engineer, I can't see him specifically having much to bring to the table for sorting out manufacturing issues. (I have worked doing QA in an industrial setting. ISO 9001, six-sigma and all the rest do start to have a point when you are working at scale and want to guarantee quality, throughput, efficiency, customer deadlines etc.) Tesla is bringing nothing new to the table on these fronts that I have seen.

drawkbox 8y ago
Musk can easily bring in process people and metric focused people to help. Removing the product/engineering focused CEO that is part of the product innovation and success is a very bad idea. You do need a focused innovative leader to run innovative companies that are competing with big players, if you get a metrics guy as the CEO or one calling the shots they will fade away. Taking away the founder/creator is like how Python is without Guido and Linux kernel without Linus, they will eventually run out of momentum and get convoluted with many directions trying to take the lead for short term needs, similar to how node went for a long time or Microsoft under Ballmer or Apple under John Sculley (they thought an exec guy from Pepsi could run a technology company). The typical process only focused metric MBA guys should come in when the innovating is done and it is time to focus on short term revenues over product, which eventually runs out everytime as it is milked and research and development is killed. There is a reason Amazon is so successful still, Bezos is an engineer/product guy first that is laser focused on taking profits and putting them back into R&D, hard to beat that as you can see.

by rleigh 8y ago

drawkbox 8y ago

Musk can easily bring in process people and metric focused people to help. Removing the product/engineering focused CEO that is part of the product innovation and success is a very bad idea. You do need a focused innovative leader to run innovative companies that are competing with big players, if you get a metrics guy as the CEO or one calling the shots they will fade away. Taking away the founder/creator is like how Python is without Guido and Linux kernel without Linus, they will eventually run out of momentum and get convoluted with many directions trying to take the lead for short term needs, similar to how node went for a long time or Microsoft under Ballmer or Apple under John Sculley (they thought an exec guy from Pepsi could run a technology company). The typical process only focused metric MBA guys should come in when the innovating is done and it is time to focus on short term revenues over product, which eventually runs out everytime as it is milked and research and development is killed. There is a reason Amazon is so successful still, Bezos is an engineer/product guy first that is laser focused on taking profits and putting them back into R&D, hard to beat that as you can see.