TL; DR: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice
Joe Justice worked for Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.
In this Hands-on Agile meetup, Joe shared DX, or Digital Transformation, the agile operating system for TeslaSpeed—a term coined by the EU Commission to talk about how fast Tesla moves and how fast they need to move now.
📺 Watch the video now: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business mit Joe Justice — Hands-on Agile EXTRA.
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Abstract: DX, or Digital Transformation
Joe shared DX, or Digital Transformation, the agile operating system for TeslaSpeed—a term coined by the EU Commission to talk about how fast Tesla moves and how fast they need to move now.
The 12-step DX process brings companies from where they are now toward their manifest destiny.
Summary by Adrian-Emil Suciu
My Key takeaways from Joe Justice interview by Stefan Wolpers “How Would Elon Musk Run Your Company:”
- There is no known process at Tesla (no SCRUM, no Kanban, no Lean); they built their own by continuous experimentation.
- Tesla is a “Radical Experimentation” company; they keep multiple versions of their product in production at the same time.
- Experimentation is driven by thorough testing; testing is a central activity in every team.
- Hiring is NOT based on roles; they hire based on the relevant qualification of the candidate to the problem at hand.
- Teams self-organize around very bold goals.
- There is a perfect alignment around the general company goal; it is called the “1000 years goal.”
- Teams self-form around experiments ideas, using Open Space Technology.
- Each experiment aims to improve a tiny fraction of the product, e.g., heat pump energy consumption.
- There are no specialty teams at Tesla; they are all blended software/hardware teams.
- Teams have 100% decision freedom, respecting the 15 core rules of the company.
- This flat, team-decision-driven environment creates great motivation for the employees.
“I won’t forget the anecdotic parts:”
- 🎃 If you take a Musk product and rip off the plastic cover, you may find some wood or parts belonging to an experiment. Some products are, therefore, unique, containing manually manufactured parts.
- 🎃 Elon Musk does not own a house; he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the factory.
Meet Joe Justice
Joe Justice is a TED.com speaker and guest lecturer at MIT and Oxford University in England. He has been featured in Forbes five times to date, including as owner of a “Company to watch” by the Forbes Billionaire Club, cited in more than eight business paperbacks and hardcovers, and is the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary for his work creating the disciplines “Extreme Manufacturing,” “Agile Hardware,” and “The Justice Method.”
Joe Justice founded WIKISPEED and operated Agile@Tesla from the global headquarters of Tesla‘s Fremont, California.
Watch the recording of Joe Justice’s talk on How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business now:
Q&A Session with Joe Justice
During the Q&A session, Joe Justice answered the following questions from attendees:
- Who sets the rules for limiting autonomy?
- What patterns or principles did the Musk companies use to reduce the cost of change in hardware development? Regression testing and integration testing, I’d presume to be the first few mentioned, but what else?
- What is your view on Scrum or whatever framework at scale? Fundamentally, what considerations should you make once your organization can be expressed only in terms of the power of 3?
- What is your advice on bringing together teams who develop software components with other teams who develop hardware components of a common product (everything has to come together, but these teams have different working methods)?
(Please note that the questions have been slightly edited to improve legibility.)