Julien Reszka
Elon Musk's five-step improvement process is ordered deliberately, and the order is the insight.
- Make your requirements less dumb. Every requirement has an owner, and that owner is probably wrong about at least one thing, regardless of how smart they are.
- Delete the part or process entirely. If you are not occasionally adding things back in after deleting too aggressively, you have not deleted enough.
- Simplify or optimise. Only here, in third position, does the word 'optimise' appear — because optimising a process that should not exist is waste disguised as progress.
- Accelerate cycle time.
- Automate.
Musk's own admission is that he has personally made the mistake of going in reverse — automating first, then accelerating, then simplifying — and paid for it. Dara Khosrowshahi at Uber makes the same point from a different angle: when Uber's mobility business lost 85% of its volume overnight at the start of the pandemic, the response was not careful deliberation. It was top-down and fast — because a decision that is twenty percent off but made immediately beats a perfect answer that arrives after the window has closed. The process question and the decisiveness question are the same: are you spending time on things that should not exist?
