John McNeill

He hires orthogonally.

So what he means by that is he hires people that might have some related insight, but have never really worked directly either on the problem or maybe in the industry before.

And it's not 100%.

There are exceptions to the rule for sure.

But for the most part, nobody came from the industry.

And the reason for that is he didn't want you coming in with a preconceived notion of how the industry worked, could work, what was possible, what wasn't possible.

And that turns out to be a hell of an advantage when you get a fresh set of eyes.

And or people that just don't know enough not to be crazy enough to consider other solutions.

And Jim Farley at Ford just talked about this over the past couple of weeks.

He described a teardown of a Tesla they did, and they tore down their leading EV, the Mustang E.

And he said, all of a sudden, when you start to tear down these vehicles next to each other, you start to realize, oh, these people had no car experience.

Therefore, they weren't biased to do things that car people would do.

And the example he gave is the nervous system of a car is called the wiring harness.

And it's literally hundreds of pounds of wire that gets strung around the car.

So different things work like your headlights and your music and your seat and the AC, etc.,

When they did the teardown, they realized that the Tesla wiring harness weighed 76 pounds less than the Ford wiring harness.

That's a very big deal because that's basically half a human you have to carry around in the car.

And so that really affects the car's range.

And Farley said, I knew why it happened because car people at Ford never questioned pulling weight out of the wiring harness.

So they would just call the supply chain people and say, I need a wiring harness.