How does SpaceX do what it does? Extreme Ownership.

Here is Paul Cipparone discussing the company culture at SpaceX which revolves around an idea of extreme ownership:

… if you own something (like a project or a piece of hardware), you are responsible for every aspect of it, regardless of the circumstances. For example, if you order something and the vendor was late in delivering it, that’s on you and you should be looking at a different vendor. In reality, people are a little more understanding than that, but the theme is constantly present- you don’t blame other people for the stuff that you own…

 

Another big consequence of ownership is that engineers aren’t just holed away in the main office building, cranking out designs that they have no connection to afterwards. Elon calls this “ivory tower engineering.” Instead, you’re expected to design, build, and test whatever you own.

That is in stark contrast to the Department of Defense, where everybody and nobody has responsibility for a program. SpaceX sounds like it disaggregates larger program tasks into numerous sub tasks and divvies those out to working level people to totally own. That not only allows the organization to move fast and resolve problems without going up and down hierarchies, it also gives people at the lower levels experience in making hard decisions and learning from that.

In the DoD, many officials aren’t in a position to make big decisions until they reach something like an O-6 or a GS-15, and then they have massive responsibility that they weren’t ready for. So the DoD needs to think about disaggregating system, providing responsibilities below the program officer level, and take development incrementally, knowing that there will be pivots.