122 - Joe Justice

Transcript:

Joe Krebs 00:20

Welcome to another episode of agile FM. Today is back to Agile FM show just as we spoke in, I looked it up may 2020. Already on this podcast. And last time this was interesting. We talked about wikispeed a lot cars. And you were sitting, I remember that vividly you were sitting in a Tesla, we were doing the recording straight from a Tesla. And today we're going to talk about Tesla. What's the irony of that after two years later? This is awesome. Welcome back.

Joe Justice 00:53

What an amazing full circle. Joe, it's my honor and privilege to be collaborating with you and your entire audience again, today. Thank you so much. In the meantime, I did work at Tesla and operate the Agile program at Tesla. And I learned a lot. And I'd be happy to update the community on what I learned while working in the company.

Joe Krebs 01:16

Yeah, so I just recently traveled to to Austin for for business reasons and took a cab back to the airport. And I kept traveling and traveling and traveling on that highway. I don't know what number that was. But I was still passing this new headquarter of Tesla just buildings in under construction right now. But I believe somebody said it's the biggest building in the country or something like that, and in square footage or something. And it's obviously under construction. But it is massive. And it's impressive. And it shows something about growth of this company. And I want to talk a little bit about what supports that growth, I want to talk a little bit about what's the agile mindset of of Tesla, this company is so on fire that sometimes it feels like it's not transparent and what's going on. At least that's my perception, right? And you're gonna debunk this because it is actually very transparent.

Joe Justice 02:10

Bizarrely about transparency, I have not ever worked in a company as transparent as Tesla, except when I ran my own company, wikispeed, wikispeed was the accounting was public, anyone could join anywhere in the world, they could simply join the company, and they were as inside as anyone else. Tesla is the closest to that I've ever seen. And that from a company with 110,000 employees and 500,000 suppliers is shocking. Most people think by the time you have more than seven employees, you probably can't afford to be transparent anymore. And Tesla has destroyed that. For example, when Elon gives what do I want to call it? I guess marching orders. When Elon says this is important. He does it through Twitter. That's how the employees see it, too. That's why it's so important that Twitter be a public record where you'll be able to say what you believe is important whether or not everyone agrees, which is Elon stance, Elon stances, Twitter should be the global Town Square where anyone can say what they think is important and not be censored. The reason why well, well, one of them is that's how Elon uses it for the business. When Elon wants to say, here's the update of the master plan, He does it through Twitter, like employees don't get it sooner than that. They look at Twitter, too. So the company is truly led in the open.

Joe Krebs 03:42

It's very different to other companies out there, right where you have to get a legal approval for going on Twitter first.

Joe Justice 03:48

Yes, yeah. Where it's you get tweets, where where other CEOs, for example, try to sound hip and cool. But it's gone through a PR department. It's gone through marketing. It was part of a quarterly release plan that was planned six months ago. And it's completely different in Elon's case. Truly, that's when the employees get the information as well.

Joe Krebs 04:16

Unbelievable, that is fantastic. So what he was or what Tesla is in the news very lately is working from home for working from home being you know, being removed, or at least like trying to be reduced to coming back to the site. Doe