Musk – The Scent
of Change

Musk now looks set to take his chainsaw to the US Government in his new role within Trump’s administration and really focus attention on the waste. He will most likely not be short of material and headlines in his endeavour. If he is able to make a dent in the expenditure we can expect efficiency to become infectious – other governments, multiple electorates and many boards will begin to ask – Do we really need all of that cost? Can we deliver the same for half the spend?

In most cases, the answer will likely be yes. However, to deliver change of that magnitude all in one go, you need a change agent with a rock solid mandate. The better news is that it can also be done at a micro level, there are tools and approaches that yield the results without the headlines and protests, it just takes a little longer.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I watched with great interest as he made radical cuts to the cost base. I wrote an article back then titled ‘What Wall Street Can Learn From Twitter’ but I never published it as the whole event became somewhat divisive and political. The essence of the piece was how Musk just saw a different way of working, how an organisation could be designed to be way more efficient and function just as effectively. Obviously the business side of X took a beating for other reasons not because he cut the operating costs, leading some to claim it was a hugely value destructive move. The counter is that he did it for very different reasons.

He may have taken a heavy handed, politically charged and over-bearing approach at Twitter, later X, but he executed radical change very quickly. Try doing that under normal business conditions and the defence mechanisms kick in; the ‘frozen middle’ resist all changes, justify why they need this or that application, team or person and grind the whole program to a halt.

My sense is that almost all organisations drift into a bloated state to the point it feels normal, what we can all learn from what Musk did at Twitter is that we could probably deliver the same business outcomes with a fraction of the input costs.

I was talking to a banking CTO friend of mine who, after 2-3 years of budget freezes or cuts, was talking about how he has learnt to do more with less. Now they are questioning more profligate colleagues and believe he could do much more in savings with no impact in service levels.

As the influence of figures like Musk and President Trump’s administration start to shape global economic trends, the pressure to optimise resources and reduce inefficiencies will only increase. Let’s wait and see how everything unfolds…