Marc Andreessen says Elon Musk runs 120 design reviews a day in 5-minute slots.
He does this while running six different companies at once.
Andreessen says Elon maps each company as a production process.
Each process has one bottleneck — the single thing slowing it down.
Elon finds the engineer working on that bottleneck and sits with them until it's fixed.
He does this at Tesla 52 times a year. Personally.
"There's no CEO like this."
Most CEOs run their companies through a wall of middle managers.
Andreessen watched IBM collapse under that model.
Inside IBM, they had a name for the failure mode: the "Big Gray Cloud."
It was the traveling court of suited men who kept the CEO away from engineers.
After 12 layers of compounding lies, the CEO had no idea what was happening.
Elon's method is the polar opposite.
Design review math:
- 5 minutes per engineer
- 12 reviews per hour
- 10 hours per day
- 120 reviews per day
An engineer described working for him as entering "a zone of shocking competence."
On sustaining it, Elon's rule is:
"I don't take vacations."
What's the one weekly bottleneck in your work that nobody's fixing?
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