The Supercharger kerfuffle should be a clear wakeup call to Tesla’s Board that the organization is in a transition that needs a new quarterback.
ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic image of a Tesla Supercharger with a camel and a big anthropomorphized sponge glaring at one another
Along the way, not satisfied with the rather absurd numbers of things I was learning professionally, my hobbies progressed through skiing to snowboarding, windsurfing to kitesurfing and wing-foiling, three variants of unicycling, a couple of variants of juggling, Texas Hold’em ring games to tournaments to online, paragliding including the southern cliffs of Bali, 3D NURBs-based modeling of furniture and consumer products, building furniture, acting and improv and a few things I’m just not...
You find a sponge. A sponge is a person who loves new things and challenges. You tell the sponge, take ten bricks to the building site every day. You don’t tell them how, you just give them a target and let them go. Now it’s time to find a camel. A camel is a person who loves having a routine, a job, and a known path and stable targets. You tell the sponge, teach the camel the route across the swamp. Help them get across the path the first couple of times. Fix stuff that the camel balks at, perhaps a pole vault or rope swing that’s just a bit too much.
Inception of a project or startup is all about trying to figure out if there’s a business case or value proposition and identifying roughly how you think you’ll solve the problem and especially identifying all of the risks you can think of. It’s all sponges with the exception of a small administrative group who make sure everyone has basic tools like security badges and that they get paid on time. There’s an off-ramp in there if there is no viable business case.
If inception and elaboration are done well, construction goes smoothly, and the off-ramp to project close-out doesn’t get taken. Typically, I was brought in to run inception and elaboration phases, and later to structure out multiyear programs during sales efforts, then to help launch the program, and then brought in as new phases started to help with the change in approach, and often as a fixit guy when thing went off the rails due to any one of the thousand reasons projects go off the rails.
But there are no sponges left in the organization. It’s all camels, Six Sigma efficiency gurus and ISO 9000 quality control experts. They don’t have the conditions for success for transformation inside the organization, so they have to bring experts from outside the organization.
This AI-generated image — by OpenAI tools, a firm Musk was one of the primary founders of, although he had to step aside a few years ago for conflict of interest with Tesla AI efforts — is a bit of an exaggeration of how Superchargers are delivered and installed on sites, but not much of one. There are approaching zero technical or engineering risks in any of this. There are logistical challenges, regulatory hurdles, contractor screw-ups, incompetent camels and the like, but virtually nothing that would keep a sponge entertained for more than a day every week or four.
Superchargers went from strength to strength, getting more juice through the cables more quickly and safely, adding liquid cooling and now delivering megawatt-scale chargers. The Tesla plug is now the standard in North America. The Supercharger business is a mature, steady state operational business. It’s growing rapidly still, but it’s deploying exactly the same product in highly optimized ways using exactly the same processes and software. It’s dealing with challenges, but the challenges aren’t challenges sponges like, they are filling in city approval forms correctly and getting contractors to show up and put wires in place. They are fulfilling orders in a work management system.
Full self-driving is now in the construction phase in my opinion, and not in the transition phase. Enormous numbers of high-quality sponges are still required for the full self-driving team.
Musk doesn’t appear to like camels at all. If he could build something with a team of sponges in an office and bunch of robots in a factory with no humans at all, he would. But he delivers stuff in the real world, where operational efficiency wonks and ISO 9000 quality controls are an absolute must.
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