Elon Musk on making progress, using AI for customer feedback and entertaining ‘degrowth’

A weekly round-up—3 discoveries, 1 reflection and a quote worth remembering in the innovation & design space—for leaders invested in digital transformation.

By Maish Nichani

External happenings

5-step process for making progress from Elon Musk

In this video, Elon Musk explains the 5-step process he implements in his company to ensure efficient engineering. Here’s the summary:

1. Make your requirements less dumb
2. Try very hard to delete parts or processes
3. Simplify/optimise
4. Accelerate cycle time
5. Automate

The fantastic thing about this is that it is a design process. Remember, design is a high-resolution approach to solving problems (addressing many interconnected things), and Elon is giving this high-resolution version of it. Brilliant.

GenAI can help companies do more with customer feedback

???“For companies that are still struggling to find the right place to deploy this new tech, we recommend use cases involving “voice of the customer” applications — parsing, interpreting, and responding to customer input from all different channels. They are typically easier to implement than employee productivity use cases because they don’t require as much behaviour change. It is also easier to measure improvements in economic value because improving customer satisfaction often has a financial payoff.”

Yes! This use case is the most tangible and the easiest to prove ROI. The kicker is that such a system can be implemented in weeks, especially when we bypass integration issues and focus on putting all the info in a shared folder. The difficulty comes when we are dealing with documents, especially image PDFs. We need to invoke computer vision applications and workflows, but again, this is becoming easier to do by the day.

Key words: Degrowth

I am seeing many mentions of this word: Degrowth. Here’s an article that clearly explains its meaning.

???”Degrowth is a pledge to rethink and obliterate the strive for perpetual growth as the ideological, social and biophysical materialisation of capitalist accumulation, and as the ultimate expression of human achievement.”

Imagine having a degrowth discussion with the CEO of a growing business or a startup founder. It would be a very short discussion. Degrowth is a massive rethink of society, but it is a welcome thought experiment. Instead of big degrowth, tiny degrowth is more realistic. Reducing personal or home consumption is a possibility, for example. What do you think?

Internal reflections

Talking about thought experiments, here’s another one I had with a potential client last week: “If the website fails to deliver any value, can we entertain the proposition to close it down?” The Zoom call fell very silent. We talk about customer-centricity, but often it is about internal security. As consultants, we must keep our distance and be objective about situations, even when we get shocked stares.

Quote worth remembering

“Your clients are too close to things and your objectivity (i.e., distance) gives you a reliable perspective. As much as they try, they can’t step outside of their own reality and see what’s really happening. Being an outsider is part of what makes you valuable.”

- David Baker explains the duties of a consultant in Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors