There were probably high-fives, maybe even some back-flips of joy in home builder land this past week or so.
News that Tesla’s big plan to fully automate car assembly for the vaunted–and much delayed–below $35,000 Model 3 sedan had failed must have come as clear vindication for an occupational group of successful business people who’ve “seen this all before.”
Tesla’s visionary founder and ceo Elon Musk struck what has become his signature self-deprecation-with-a-smile tone as he admitted a blunder that would be minor in no one’s book.
“Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake,” the CEO wrote in a tweet Friday, hours after CBS aired an interview in which he acknowledged putting too many robots in Tesla’s lone auto factory. “Humans are underrated.”
Deeper below the headlines of the story, there’s insight that’s even more meaningful to home builders–who are grappling today with inertial forces holding back productivity and a growing risk to construction capacity as the total skilled labor force looks prone to a sudden hemorrhage as older workers age out and younger workers don’t replace them. The insight comes from Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Max Warburton, who had researched auto assembly plants around the world for an influential Massachusetts Institute of Technology research group before joining the finance industry, according to Bloomberg correspondent Dana Hill.
“German OEMs — traditionally the most enthusiastic proponents of automation — have actually been rowing back on it in recent years,” Warburton wrote. “The best producers — still the Japanese — try to limit automation. It is expensive and is statistically inversely correlated to quality. One tenet of lean production is ‘stabilize the process, and only then automate.’ If you automate first, you get automated errors. We believe Tesla may be learning this to its cost.”
A big take-away for home builders, who know quite a lot from experience the exponential nature and dizzying financial consequence of errors on the job site.
Home construction can view Musk’s and Tesla’s missteps as a clinic in what and what not to do on the way to pivoting into a more technological future of housing. Builders–some of whom are already either frustrated or cynical or both about Tesla’s two-steps-forward-one-step-back entry into the solar roof panel business, may take the wrong learning out of Musk’s high-visibility and halting attempt to leverage automation technology to disrupt both big transportation and big energy, sweeping homes and communities into the Tesla force-field while he’s at it–may think of Musk as an ego-filled so-and-so.
The lesson to learn here may be that change–even necessary and urgent change–doesn’t come easy in home building. The lesson not to learn is “Tesla’s automation failures show that our current site-oriented assembly processes are–and will continue to be–the proven best way to achieve productivity and quality in the start-to-completion construction cycle.”
If you tend toward that reflex, think of another innovator, one who tended to get out over his skis with promises and panache before actually delivering the goods. Steven Johnson’s, “How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World” tells us of another wry, self-deprecating genius who described himself as more of a “sponge than an inventor.” Johnson writes of Thomas Edison in the late 1870s:
“Edison was also a master of what we would now call “vaporware”: He announced nonexistent products to scare off competitors. Just a few months after he started work on electric light, he began telling reporters from New York papers that the problem had been solved, and that he was on the verge of launching a national system of magical electrical light. A system so simple, he says, ‘that a bootblack might understand it.’
Despite this bravado, the fact remained that the finest specimen of electrical light in the Edison lab couldn’t last five minutes. But that didn’t stop him from inviting the press out to Menlo Park lab to see his revolutionary lightbulb. Edison would bring each reporter in one at a time, flick the switch on a bulb, and let the reporter enjoy the light for three or four minutes before ushering him from the room. When he was asked how long his lightbulbs would last, he answered confidently: ‘Forever, almost.’
We learn from Steven Johnson that while discovery of the electric light still shines as one of Edison’s crowning moments of genius, another true “lightbulb moment” came out of the process that led to the achievement.
“Menlo Park [and the diverse Edison team of experts known as the “muckers”] marked the beginning of an organizational form that would come to prominence in the twentieth century: the cross-disciplinary research-and-development lab. In this sense, the transformative ideas and technologies that came out of places such as Bell Labs and Xerox-PARC have their roots in Edison’s workshop. Edison didn’t just invent technology; he invented an entire system for inventing.”
This is truly the take-away builders should try to extract from the hiccups, backfires, breakdowns, and, yes, humbling admissions of failure we are witness to in Tesla’s ambitious path to changing the way we generate power and move from place to place.
This may not be a newsflash, but there’s no time like the present moment to understand “There’s no good alternative to investing in R&D.” Also, by investing in it, you may invent your own “entire system for inventing.” That’s a lightbulb moment.
