Recently, I was reading about how Tesla is innovating on the 100 year old moving assembly line with their “Unboxed” approach. Here’re a quick summary from the company's presentation. 

What Tesla has attempted here is to rebuild the automotive assembly line using first principles thinking to improve the cost, time and footprint to build their electric cars. While their idea isn’t entirely novel, it’s application to the moving assembly line, an industry standard, can be extremely beneficial to Tesla in hitting an aggressive cost target.

Sometimes we find ourselves blocked from achieving our goals. First principles thinking can open our eyes to ideas to find meaningful and effective solutions to these roadblocks.

So what is first principles thinking? In this 2 part series, let’s take a look by quickly exploring the origins of first principles thinking, its key components, and how it can be implemented in problem solving and unblocking us from achieving our toughest goals. In part 2, we will also examine a few example…

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