Re: Musk has lot of bold goals, but how many has he achieved?

"Stephen Harding"  wrote in message news:[email protected]...

There is also the issue of scale.  A person can be quite good at
engineering and management in the initial stages of a technology
development, but things get very much out of hand when the company is
initially successful and then grows.

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That's the reason for Skunk Works, small select groups within a larger 
organization tasked with an often secret project and only loosely if at all 
supervised by management. I was read into them at both Segway and Mitre.

The name arose at Lockheed for secret jet fighter projects, after Lockheed 
engineers had developed one on their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_L-133
based on early steam and then gas turbine R&D by Nathan Price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_J37

British experimental electronic warfare development followed a similar 
pattern of very small groups, each member solely responsible for a bounded 
portion such as electrical, mechanical or optical. The leader made sure one 
member's output matched another's needed input.
https://www.abebooks.com/9780698108967/Wizard-British-Scientific-Intelligence-1939-1945-0698108965/plp
It's well written and not as technical as it could (should) have been.

Mitre was created to address that problem for government communications etc 
projects, initially the DEW line, with a corporate culture that amounted to 
many small units dreaming up answers to assigned multidisciplinary problems 
with large national technical systems, like AWACS, GPS or the FAA's 1940's 
radio technology.

Projects bog down when the indivisible portions become too complex for one 
engineer. IMHO that's more typical of extensive than intensive complexity. 
Two or more tend to champion different approaches unless the leader can 
clearly define the needs.

This is an excellent description of the Tiger Team group dynamics and 
effective leadership style:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
When it came out I was on a similar team developing an LSI-11 based machine 
to test computer chips on the production line. Our leader was a brilliant 
Ph.D. with an easygoing (but very focused) beard and sandals hippie attitude 
and VW bus. When I mentioned I had made insulating polyester film inserts 
for my home windows he mentally calculated the radiative heat transfer 
through them.