What Would a Team Boss Do?

Happy Friday,

Every couple of weeks, 75-100 million people worldwide tune in to the most intense, high-stakes engineering competition on Earth. Ten teams, with hundreds of engineers, scientists, and technicians each. 

The teams receive a detailed specification (the Formula) from which they design and construct 2 identical vehicles from scratch. They look like race cars, but they’re more akin to aircraft with upside-down wings that produce downforce to enhance grip, rather than uplift to fly – though they produce enough downforce at speed to pin the cars to the roof of a tunnel.

Teams employ some of Europe's most sophisticated and powerful computing resources, using high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, advanced algorithms, computational fluid dynamics, AI, and machine learning to optimize vehicle design and inform race strategies continuously in real-time. 

Timed competitions take place at 23 venues on five continents under highly variable conditions. Vehicle/team performance is measured to the 1/1000 of a second over a ~2-hour period, then ranked and points awarded. The objective is to win the “Constructors Championship”.

Team budgets are in the hundreds of millions. Each vehicle costs $12-16 million to build and teams will gladly spend $10 million to shave a tenth of a second off a lap. During the race, pit crews routinely change all four tires and release the car in under ~2.5 seconds. Such is the intensity of the team-wide focus on performance.

This is the pinnacle of engineering competition. The absolute crucible. So imagine being a Team Boss. You can’t overstate the pressure to optimize every aspect of these organizations, or the urgency to continually innovate, recruit, motivate, effectively lead, progress, learn, perform, outperform, and win. Every team’s performance relative to its competitors is revealed for the world to judge and scrutinize 23 times a year, with the results directly impacting reputation, sponsorship, and future opportunities. 

Should your engineering organization or team benchmark off of Formula 1?

“Benchmarking is a systematic process of comparing an organization’s processes, performance metrics, and practices to those of leading companies or industry best practices. The goal is to identify areas for improvement, understand how top performers achieve their results, and implement strategies to enhance one’s performance.” 

Sure, why not?

Areas of potential improvement might include 1) leadership excellence; 2) actual, rather than faux accountability; 3) instilling a mindset of relentless, rapid improvement; 4) use of data analytics on projects; 5) better cross-functional collaboration, interdepartmental communication, and teamwork; 6) greater focus on improving efficiency by streamlining or eliminating processes, distractions, longwinded memos, and meetings; 7) application of expertise across different sectors; 8) greater emphasis on project management excellence; and 9) rigorous post-project analysis to refine processes.

If a Formula 1 team boss stepped into your job tomorrow, what would he do? Consider doing that.

Have a great weekend!

Dave

Your feedback and blowback are welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

All past topics are still available at @goodnewsfriday.com

Written by me, not ChatGPT, with speed assist by Grammarly.