Born in 1971 in South Africa, Elon Musk is an American entrepreneur who is most notable for founding the company X.Com (which is now known as PayPal). He also founded: SpaceX, which manufactures space launch vehicles which are replacing NASA's space shuttle program; Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, the first electric car to go to production; and Solar City, which is the largest supplier of solar energy systems in the USA. He has a net worth of 2.4 billion dollars. The following is an excerpt from an interview with him in the November 2011 issue of Wired:
Chris Anderson: So how do you do it? What's your process?
Elon Musk: Now I have to tell you something, and I mean this in the best and most inoffensive way possible: I don't believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that "it's all about the process," I see that as a bad sign.
Chris Anderson: Oh no. I'm fired.
Elon Musk: The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.
I was interested in this interview partly because I feel that we have many students in the program for which process and proper procedure are an anathema I don't confuse rejecting procedure with intelligence, and I
DO believe that many of my students need to learn strategies for working with systems, but I wonder if we should be careful to recognize that challenging accepted practice is sometimes a necessity.
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