Trying to Lift Off

 

As I wrapped up my 2024 reading, I read a pair of books about SpaceX:  Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX and its sequel Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age

On the one hand, as someone who grew up in and around a planetarium, and who has always been fascinating by space flight, these are great for the sheer joy of seeing it all happen again. There was a PBS documentary from 1985 entitled Spaceflight, narrated by Martin Sheen, which I watched as a kid till the VHS tape wore out.  I have never grown out of that fascination.  

I've watched my share of SpaceX launches, but reading the detailed account of the scrappy, high speed fashion in which the company and their rockets were built is fascinating, inspiring, and reminds me of some of the things that I've been discovering as I work closer to fully launching my own business (not going to Mars, just helping people improve their prices and lower their costs.)

Something I heard a company founder say recently in an interview was, "The rules are made up, and no one knows what they are doing."

The higher up I get in business, the more this strikes me as true. But also, the thing that strikes me is: Just doing the basics right is very, very hard. Most of the time, most companies, are not hitting all the basics. On the one hand, it seems like companies should be able to do that and more.  And yet, I look around the office and how often people come into meetings and say, "Oh, yeah, sorry, I didn't send that email."  "I didn't have time to do that."  "We didn't check to see if that worked."

Just doing all the basics right will put you ahead of a lot of people.  So many teams get bogged down in endless cycles and approach their goals like the sprinter in Zeno's Paradox.

And on the other side, if you're truly driven, you can do a lot of things wrong and still move faster and be more successful than most.

That latter situation is what seemed often to be at play in the books about SpaceX. As we've all had reason to see, Elon Musk can be chaotic and drive so fast as to skip steps.  And yet, reading these books (and having read Walter Isaacson's lengthy biography of Musk a year ago) it's clear that he both has an ability to instill a tremendous inspiration and urgency towards a goal, and to do an almost superhuman job of hiring the right people for critical roles.

SpaceX routinely burns those right people out.  And yet it continues to make progress towards its goals in ways that few organizations do. It seems fully believable that if he doesn't get distracted with Twitter fights and dabbling in government, Musk will get humans to Mars 20 to 50 years sooner than might otherwise have been the case.

Meanwhile at my last two day jobs I can see the contrast between a company in which the CEO was able to inspire people with a vision and drive, despite himself being an utter chaos monkey who often sabotaged his own efforts, and a company with a CEO who is genuinely good at leading projects and yet who is not good at the inspire-the-room thing it takes to keep people moving at speed through significant change.

Leading people is hard -- and hard to define. The more I think about starting an organization in which I hope myself to lead people, the less sure I feel about whether I have the indefinable skills or instincts it takes to provide that leadership. A lot of company founders can get things done but will never be able to inspire people to excel, and so they will either never grow big or if big will move ponderously along tapped within the habits of consensus.

And then other people, with some combination of imagination and drive and willingness to put the objective above the individuals, are very, very good at moving an organization forward at speed.

Don't worry, the SpaceX books are honestly all about rockets, with few meditations on these vague questions of leadership. If you like rockets, you'll like those books.

But this -- combined with the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs which I also read recently -- have very much set me thinking about how flawed some very effective leaders are, and how many nice people are not effective leaders.

If you'd like to read some much less ruminative writing of mine about business, I'm putting up a steady one-article-per-week at Pricing-Evolution.com and also posting one podcast per week, if you desire the mellifluous sound of my voice. Of particular interest might be the latest episode about how pricing influenced the rise of mega-bookstores, and then Amazon, and then ebooks -- and why traditional publishers have had such a fraught relationship with ebooks.  It's all about pricing.