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SpaceX and the Quest

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SpaceX and the Quest ( spacex-and-quest )

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an arbitrary time increase. It’s different to say, “Well, what do you promise people?” Because you want to try to promise people something that includes schedule margin. But in order to achieve the external promised schedule, you’ve got to have an internal schedule that’s more aggressive than that. Sometimes you still miss the external schedule. SpaceX, by the way, is not alone here. Being late is par for the course in the aerospace industry. It’s not a question of if it’s late, it’s how late will the program be. I don’t think an aerospace program has been completed on time since bloody World War II. Dealing with the epically aggressive schedules and Musk’s expectations has required SpaceX’s engineers to develop a variety of survival techniques. Musk often asks for highly detailed proposals for how projects will be accomplished. The employees have learned never to break the time needed to accomplish something down into months or weeks. Musk wants day-by-day and hour-by-hour forecasts and sometimes even minute-by-minute countdowns, and the fallout from missed schedules is severe. “You had to put in when you would go to the bathroom,” Brogan said. “I’m like, ‘Elon, sometimes people need to take a long dump.’” SpaceX’s top managers work together to, in essence, create fake schedules that they know will please Musk but that are basically impossible to achieve. This would not be such a horrible situation if the targets were kept internal. Musk, however, tends to quote these fake schedules to customers, unintentionally giving them false hope. Typically, it falls to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, to clean up the resulting mess. She will either need to ring up a customer to give them a more realistic timeline or concoct a litany of excuses to explain away the inevitable delays. “Poor Gwynne,” Brogan said. “Just to hear her on the phone with the customers is agonizing.” There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees. Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The ideal SpaceX employee is someone like Steve Davis, the director of advanced projects at SpaceX. “He’s been working sixteen hours a day every day for years,” Brogan said. “He gets more done than eleven people working together.” To find Davis, Musk called a teaching assistant* in Stanford’s aeronautics department and asked him if there were any hardworking, bright master’s and doctoral candidates who didn’t have families. The TA pointed Musk to Davis, who was pursuing a master’s degree in aerospace engineering to add to degrees in finance, mechanical engineering, and particle physics. Musk called Davis on a Wednesday and offered him a job the following Friday. Davis was the twenty-second SpaceX hire

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