Joe Justice talks about how Toyota has been the number one car company in the world because of their focus on efficiency and quality. However, Toyota’s Corolla and Camry has been displaced as the top car model by the Tesla Model Y. Elon Musk focuses on leading all of his companies (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, X.Ai, Neuralink and Boring Company) with a sense of urgency. Everything is done with a drive for speed and innovation.
Elon Musk has the pace of innovation as being of primary importance. This still results in lower wastage and most efficiency but this is a secondary effect after iteration with innovation.
Joe Justice, former Tesla employee and consultant to just about every major business you’ve heard of, discusses how Japanese “Just ON Time” culture has been transformative to their society in the past, but with the advent of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla has fallen behind to Tesla’s more agile (or post-agile) business model.
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Great point. What the Chinese copy from Elon will be obsolete by the time they finish copying it. They will never surpass the pace of Elon’s innovations, if they copy him. Elon knows this and has said it before… he is OK with others copying what he is producing with his companies. Not a problem.
It will be interesting to see how the pace of innovation changes as company scale increases.
It is easy to innovate when you are small enough to keep everyone informed of risks and consequences.
Musk was a programmer and he successfully adapted agile development process to manufacturing. This is the main reason for his success. But his competitor is copying his methodology and he is losing edge.
1. Its not so easy to `copy` its a inbuilt culture issue, Toyotas competitors found out just how hard it was to copy the leader.
2. Tesla etc are not standing still they are pushing the pace of innovation all the time, increasing the use of AI and eventually Optimius in their factories, at this moment I believe they are increasing the gap, some manufacturers will eventually catch up but the market is massive more than big enough for a few companies.
Which competitor?
This doesn’t seem to be the case with any of the legacy ICE companies or any of the BEV companies in NA like Rivian or Lucid, but maybe NIO, BYD, or other Chinese.
It’s not obvious that copying and Tesla’s culture of innovation are compatible. A company can either copy Tesla’s methodology and products or innovate itself, not necessarily both. A focus on copying likely makes a focus on innovation impossible.