In late 2018, leadership at Jeff Bezos’s spaceflight company Blue Origin was
so concerned about falling behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX that they hired
management consultants to figure out what they were doing wrong.
The consultants gave a briefing to about a dozen senior leaders Blue Origin,
and some of those executives’ notes were recently
obtained by Ars Technica.
They show that the company was obsessed with figuring out where SpaceX was
beating them — areas like talent acquisition, low-cost launches, and design
— so they could catch up.
But, given SpaceX’s utter dominance in the commercial spaceflight industry
and the fact that Blue Origin has never launched an orbital flight, it seems
that the briefing didn’t work.
Imitation, Flattery
The notes suggest that Blue Origin’s focus was on emulating SpaceX’s success
in no small part by trying to copy its business strategy. For instance,
consultants identified that SpaceX was claiming a bigger chunk of the market
by offering drastically cheaper launches and by putting more stock in
customer satisfaction than was typical for the industry.
“They have a customer focus,” a Blue Origin executive wrote at the time,
according to Ars. “We should too. In many cases we view the customer as a
nuisance. This is the case with LSA (Launch Services Agreement, or the US
Space Force), satellite launch for NG (satellite customers for the New Glenn
rocket), and astronauts for NS (New Shepard). We need to change this
culture.”
Now What?
One key problem identified by briefing was that the consultants and Blue
Origin leadership felt that their employees weren’t delivering as much as
SpaceX’s were.
“Blue is kind of lazy compared to SpaceX,” one executive wrote, according to
Ars. “I often work off-hours and weekends, just the nature of the business.
Blue is a ghost town on weekends, and I’m sure people are working, but I do
think we have quite a bit of heroic high performers picking up the slack too
often.”
Ultimately, the briefing clearly didn’t solve the company’s problems. The
gap between SpaceX and Blue Origin is far wider now than it was in 2018 — so
either Blue Origin moved in the wrong direction, or SpaceX simply continued
to outpace it.
Source: Link
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