Shooting for the stars

I was on holiday last week, and caught up on some reading as well as catching some rays and having a go at horse-riding up in the mountains of Crete, encouraged by my ex-showjumper fiancée.  (Really good fun, even if I still feel safer closer to the ground, albeit at higher speed.)  One book that I read was a biography of Elon Musk who seems to have been in the headlines even more than usual recently with a focus on his life story rather than any specific event, deal or regulatory transgression.

I have a lot of respect for what he has achieved, both with Tesla and SpaceX, but like many I suspect, just assumed that he was an entrepreneur who had an eye for a market opportunity and went for it.  The biography makes a convincing case – based on interviews with Musk himself, but also with family, friends and colleagues – that his motivation is actually quite different.  His view is that mankind should be seriously concerned about sustainability, not just in terms of global warming here on earth, but also by looking to establish a base for a sizable human community on Mars.  We can all ridicule that notion, and there is clearly an argument that adapting Mars, or bits of it at least, to support human life is just repeating the same actions that have made our climate here on Earth unsustainable in the long term without drastic action.  However, it does seem to be the genuine motivation behind most of what he does.

The second aspect of his character that comes out of the book is that he rarely follows the accepted wisdom in terms of how problems are solved, nor the timeframes over which this can be done.  He digs right down into the underlying science and wants solutions to problems rather than reports on problems.  He is willing and able to be an active participant in working out the solution, rather than simply directing others to consider options and make recommendations.  As a result, you have solutions like adapting laptop screens for use in the Dragon space capsule, rather than buying ‘aerospace grade’ screens, and changing the seals on industrial valves to pipe rocket fuel, rather than engineering a bespoke item from scratch.  You also have a much higher level of vertical integration – parts made in-house rather than outsourced – for both Tesla and SpaceX than is normal for either industry.

What’s the relevance of all that to automotive distribution?  The first is that whilst I am no fan of typical ‘mission statements’ it is at least worth genuinely asking the question what the purpose of your business is.  Perhaps it really is just about making money, and quitting as soon as the opportunity arises to spend the rest of your life at leisure, on the golf course.  Possibly it’s the ‘thrill of the chase’ – the personal satisfaction that is derived from turning sales leads into deals.  I would not criticise either motivation, and in the end any business provides some level of societal benefit through employment and tax generation.  However, it resonated for me because when ICDP was originally founded thirty years ago with charitable status, it was with the objective of supporting the industry as a whole to improve the distribution model.  I hope we’ve helped to move the needle a bit over that time, but not sure how that compares in relative terms with Elon’s progress towards setting up a colony on Mars.

The second point relates to how you go about your business, whatever the ultimate goal is.  Too often, employees at all levels including business owners and managers settle into a way of doing things.  We sell cars this way because that’s how we’ve always done it, and the business has been successful applying that model.  My workshop is effective because I’m covering the whole fixed cost of the dealership, so it must be right (the 100% overhead absorption benchmark).  Or in the case of ICDP, we’ll approach this research task in a particular way, because that’s what we’ve done for this topic in previous years and our members liked it.  In all cases, maybe yes, but maybe no.

Overall, my takeaway from a good read was that a business will be stronger and a team more committed if there is some higher, more ambitious goal than simply beating budget, and that however well-established a practice or process is, there may well be a better, faster, cheaper alternative if you just dig a bit deeper.  It doesn’t mean that we will all end up vying with Musk to be the world’s richest person, but we might together overcome some previously impossible challenges.