Before joining Tesla’s board, Antonio Gracias had invested in an electroplating plant in California, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), where he learned some important lessons:
Because Gracias spoke Spanish like most of the factory workers, he was able to learn from them where the problems were. “I realized that if you invest in a company, you should spend all your time on the shop floor,” he says. When he asked how they could speed things up, one of the workers explained that having smaller vats for the nickel baths would make the plating go faster. Those and other worker-generated ideas succeeded so well that the factory began turning a profit, and Gracias started buying more troubled companies.
He learned one very big lesson from these ventures: “It’s not the product that leads to success. It’s the ability to make the product efficiently. It’s about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you design the factory?” It was a guiding principle that Musk would make his own.
In manufacturing, most information regarding operations is spread orally. It is not written down in manuals or specifications, because those are merely abstracts of how things are done.
When you stop manufacturing, you lose all the accumulated knowledge held by the staff, and it is usually impossible to recover it in any reasonable time scale.
Off-shoring your factories also gradually eliminates your ability to design things, as you lose the interactions between designers and builders.
“When you stop manufacturing, you lose all the accumulated knowledge held by the staff, and it is usually impossible to recover it in any reasonable time scale.”
Everyone in Taiwan knows that US weapons manufacturing is crucial to Taiwan’s safety. Very few people in Taiwan fear that the US might forget how to manufacture weapons. If I knew an effective way to raise public awareness about the importance of weapons manufacturing I would devote great efforts to such messaging.
If a designer does not have sufficient input from those who actually use the product, nor from those who actually build it, what can he design? Spherical horses operated in vacuum?
As Moldbug put it, “CS research” is so obviously optimized to churn out unusable crap that even when they accidentally invent something useful, most likely it will be left buried under these Augean Stables until fossilized, as «the thing has the academic kiss of death on it, and no one will touch it».
But that’s academia. Why the process gets organized this way in actual enterprises? Is this one more result of brain damage from theocratic education, like corporate bureaucracy?