Old-school corporate tactics stifle progress
It’s easy to play it safe in business.
Suppose you’re a public company. Most of them enjoy their commanding market share after catering to an immediate need better than anyone else can. They practice disciplined business, keep their executives away from the public as best they can, and do their very best to earn the necessary profits to satisfy investors for at least one more quarter. It’s practical business. It’s boring business. If all you care about is getting rich, then this is the avenue for you. Employ little risk, enjoy steady profits.
But the paradigm is shifting. The best performing stock of 2013 was Tesla Motors, the premium electric vehicle company founded by Elon Musk. While Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, certainly practices disciplined business, it’s his own discipline that’s unlike nearly any other CEO’s. When Tesla was first founded 10 years ago, there was no pressing need for electric vehicles. Unlike today’s culture, being green or eco-friendly wasn’t quite as sexy or vogue then – leaving no immediate market need to fulfill. Nevertheless, Musk created Tesla for the practicality of its innovation, despite the initial lack of public recognition. 10 long years later and Tesla Motors is turning heads and earning profits with a platform no one ever thought could succeed.
That’s not all Musk’s ability and foresight has to show for. He’s also a founding father of PayPal and chairman of SolarCity. If being the proponent of a successful electric car company, e-commerce service or solar panel energy provider isn’t enough of a testament to both the ability of Musk and the merit of his business strategy, then hopefully his position as CEO of SpaceX, the world’s leader in commercial space travel, will win you over. What is among SpaceX’s goals? The colonization of Mars. I’m serious, and so is Elon Musk. As for what SpaceX has accomplished thus far, on top of its many contracts for satellite launches, it is a reusable rocket that has successfully launched and landed vertically.
As fantastical as Musk’s career sounds now, it was a long and hard-fought road to success. After making a small fortune from eBay’s acquirement of PayPal, Musk invested all of it into both SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Years later and the economic downturn of 2008 that hurt nearly all of us had Elon Musk facing the collapse of both his companies. A won contract for SpaceX later and Musk was no longer on the brink of a nervous breakdown, but he almost paid dearly for the two companies he had poured his life into to create. Elon Musk may be lucky, but luck certainly isn’t the foundation of his businesses. Ingenuity is.
We can’t expect every student to become as successful as Elon Musk, but we can teach and emphasize the values that have helped Musk to his success. While Musk seems to be bringing us the future earlier than we expected, he’s also a living testament to the merit of applied science and the innovative. Business doesn’t need to be all suits, corporate protocol and dark coffee. No great thing ever came about by playing it safe and following the presumed. Prospective business students take heed, and maybe you can bring about your own futurescape earlier than anticipated.