February 10: Elon Musk’s email calling for productivity

Elon Musk recently asked Tesla employees to slow down work and steady production to reduce pressure and prevent burnout.

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Source: Inc
Published: December 2021

Elon Musk’s email calling for productivity

Elon Musk recently asked Tesla employees to slow down work and steady production to reduce pressure and prevent burnout. 

In his email, Elon highlights that the two-week end-of-quarter rush leads to a significant production drop off in the first few weeks of the new quarter. This pattern leads to burnout and is not sustainable. 

Instead, Elon urges his employees to focus on a steadier pace of car deliveries that has proven to produce a similar quarterly output with fewer resources invested. 

Bonus: Read Elon’s email

From: Elon Musk

To: Everybody

Subj. Q4 deliveries vs. cost efficiency

Date: Nov. 26, 2021

Per my email several weeks ago, our focus this quarter should be on minimizing cost of deliveries rather than spending heavily on expedite fees, overtime and temporary contractors just so that cars arrive in Q4.

What has happened historically is that we sprint like crazy at end of quarter to maximize deliveries, but then deliveries drop massively in the first few weeks of the next quarter. In effect, looked at over a six month period, we won’t have delivered any extra cars but we will have spent a lot of money and burned ourselves out to accelerate deliveries in the last two weeks of each quarter. 

We will still have quite a big wave of deliveries in the last few weeks of December, as we don’t yet have high volume production either in Europe or Texas, which means a lot of cars on boats from China to Europe and on trucks [and/or] rail from California to the East Coast arriving late in the quarter, but this is nonetheless the right time to start reducing the size of the wave in favor of a steadier and more efficient pace of deliveries.

The right principle is take the most efficient action, as though we were not publicly-traded and the notion of “end of quarter” didn’t exist. 

Thanks,

Elon

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