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Yep, this is the point I was trying to make way upthread. If "the engineers just couldn't do it" is treated as a physical reality due to the objective hardness of the problem, and Musk recalibrates his future time-estimates based on that, great! If "the engineers just couldn't do it" is treated as a failure of the engineers, and people are fired for failing to conform to Musk's rosy estimate, not great! And the latter is what you'd presume by default of a manager. It might not be true of Musk in particular, but in absence of explicit evidence to the contrary, it's likely, which is why this kind of overeager optimism can be downright scary-sounding coming from a high-level corporate executive. I have a feeling that, like you said, Musk listens to these people. Maybe he actually knows their potential better than they know it themselves; knows what they can pull off when driven, that they wouldn't think (or especially claim) themselves capable of otherwise. Maybe, in other words, he's like the protagonist of some military ensemble drama series. (Jack O'Neill in Stargate SG-1, say.) And given how successful he is, maybe he is that guy! Someone's gotta be. But that guy is really rare. Most corporations, sadly, don't have that guy anywhere in them. And without that guy, you've just got unrealistic promises, followed by flops, followed by finger-pointing. |