The magic at the core of innovations in the digital ecosystem

Here is my take on what I think is the one of the magic potions the wizard Elon Musk uses at Tesla and SpaceX and SolarCity. On August 23, 2016, Elon Musk tweeted out an announcement of new milestone at Tesla. The next day Forbes published an article describing how Tesla is successful at leading the transformation in the Auto industry, even though the finance mavens on Wall Street did not agree.

What resonated in the Forbes article was how Elon Musk managed the challenge of moving a stamp press from the east coast to the west:

“After purchasing the machine at a bargain price, Tesla asked the manufacturer how long it would take to disassemble and deliver to California. The quote was a year. Tesla’s response was, “we can’t afford to wait; we’ll figure out a way to do it in 3–4 months.” And they did with an internal team that was pulled together expressly to pull off the move quickly. The team hit a number of roadblocks along the way but problem-solved their way to getting the press safely transported and installed in Freemont in four months. Concerned the press was too large for tunnels and overpasses, they cut seven inches off the press bed. They even modified and raised cranes at the factory so that the press could be reassembled and programmed. To finish off the installation, Tesla employees, including VPs, volunteered personal time on the weekends to repaint the press red, white, and grey — Tesla colors.”

The way I see it, Elon Musk was applying the hacking paradigm super programmers use in the digital ecosystem to barrel through to workable solutions. Such a team of super programmers

- Learn by making errors.

- Learn from each other in the team and share their learnings with each other.

- Are open to change, in what needs to be done and how to do it, to solve a problem at hand.

- Are open to re-defining what the problem is multiple times including going back to the drawing board, if required.

More these attributes become an integral part of an enterprise, the more likely it is to begin playing successfully in the digital ecosystem. This goes to the third question to ask, to assess how ready your organization to play in the digital ecosystem, that you will find in my previous post on how to profit from the digital ecosystem.

Of course, these may be my imaginings of how super programmers work. I am not one. But recently, since November 2015, I had an opportunity to work with some programmers as a ‘beginner’ programmer. I purchased a bitcoin mining computing device from 21.co (www.21.co) through Amazon. To make use of it, I found I had to learn Python and become part of a group of, what I consider super programmers who are into developing software to enable bitcoin based micropayments transactions. Once I set a small goal to construct a service to sell a digital image, it was simply a matter of repeatedly trying and failing and submitting code for testing, asking for feedback until I got one simple transaction of exchanging a digital image for a very small fraction of a bitcoin.

The big difference is how the wizard Elon Musk uses this magic on really big complex visionary projects. Clearly the magic is correspondingly much more complex: but the building block is the same as the one I experienced in my little bitcoin micropayments project.

The magic I speak of is the principle of learning and problem solving by making rapid collaborative iterations, errors and corrections. In my professional experience it works well and produces creative out-of-the box solutions, whether in a beta testing process for a fairly complex business process app (nowhere near the magnitude of what Tesla does), or a transformative business and systems redesign for a large enterprise.

I would be amiss if I did not point out that this magic I mention is just one of the necessary conditions for success in the digital ecosystem. I am only just beginning to learn about the force of Power Law that operates in this ecosystem and, like the invisible hand of Adam Smith in the markets of the industrial age, governs which, of the many startups in the fray, will actually succeed. More on that in later posts, as I come up to speed on Power Law. Part of the discovery is how the Google search and display algorithm may have played a seminal role in defining the dynamics implicit in the digital ecosystem we now have.