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Elon Musk wants to make human labor obsolete.
Venki Padmanabhan • The Long Game
This essay responds to “Musk races to build a robot army at Tesla. Silicon Valley is following,” by Faiz Siddiqui, …
6 months ago
The Handmaid’s Tale
Source Note: This is a Foundation Essay from The Long Game. It draws on five specific examples from my time as Trim Shift Leader at GM’s Lansing Gran…
6 months, 1 week ago
Eating the Seed Corn
My mother tried to teach me my multiplication tables. I squirmed. I whined. I ran. Eventually I climbed onto the window ledge — which in India means …
6 months, 1 week ago
94% Belongs to the System: What Deming Proved and Management Forgot
For three weeks I’ve been building an evidence case. NUMMI proved that the same workers produce opposite results under different systems. Taylor’s wr…
6 months, 1 week ago
The CFO Knows What the Robot Doesn’t
• • •
The woman who ran quality on our second shift could hear a bearing starting to fail. Not with instruments—with her ears, over the ambient roar o…
6 months, 1 week ago
Apple turns 50 today. Read Tim Cook's warm letter. There is another letter I wanted to write.
Apple turns fifty today. To mark the occasion, Tim Cook published a beautiful letter. It thanked the millions of people who used their technology to …
6 months, 2 weeks ago
I Read a Book About Quality. Then I Built the Engine.
A companion essay exploring the same Royal Enfield story through the lens of Indian jugaad was recently published by The Morning Context. This is the…
6 months, 2 weeks ago
The Suggestion Gap: A Million Ideas a Year vs. Silence
The first two essays in this series established two facts. First, the NUMMI experiment proved that the same workers, in the same building, under a di…
6 months, 2 weeks ago
I Wield a Great Instrument
I was scrolling Apple News on a Friday night when it hit me. A Forbes piece: “The Agentic Enterprise Doesn’t Mean Axing Half Your Staff.” The CEO of …
6 months, 2 weeks ago
Stop Communicating. Start Being Candid.
Here is a number that should end every AI strategy meeting in America this week: 89 percent. That is the share of firms whose executives told the Nat…
6 months, 2 weeks ago