Mgt5Pls Project Leadership | Challenges Assessment Answers

Space X and Tesla Electric Car

Elon Musk is a famed project entrepreneur who takes a hands-on approach to leading his breakthrough projects. Two of his highest risk projects are now in full production mode: The Tesla electric car and the Space X reusable rocket system.

Answer:

Challenges for leaders

Globalization has increased the competition to such a very extent that it is almost impossible to come back even if we want to. In such a competitive world being a leader is in itself a challenge. Today the knowledge economy has come to such a sharp focus that it has come to the point above anything else. Today leaders are supposed to defeat the competition and take their organization to the top at least within the industry (Nodine, & Johnstone, 2015). Working on any project will introduce challenges to leaders working on it. Leaders’ job is to take decision to direct the organization growth. Leaders are responsible for the project’s success as well as failure. Their task is to analyse every possible factor to complete the project successfully. In this journey from starting a project to the successful completion is very challenging varying from project to project. In case of projects like Space-X and Tesla Electric Car these challenges are very tough for leaders especially. Such huge projects associate with high level of multiple risks that leaders have to face during the whole time period of the project life (Kabisch, 2015). Elon Musk founder of tesla companies introduced both the projects with so much expectation that leaders working on these projects have to be very precise and make decisions with strong statistical evidences in the support of their decisions.

For leader working on such projects different external and internal challenges can be faced by leaders. In situation like working on such a big project always comes with so many responsibilities for the company. This ability of people working under such pressurised situations makes them different from other.

Challenges at Tesla Electric Car

Manufacturing an electric car was an idea to take the automobile world into the direction of using renewable energy to introduce an alternative to the industry (Nykvist, & Nilsson, 2015). This was really a big step towards the use of renewable energy and saving the earth’s environment. Working on this project leaders of the company had to face the following challenges:

• Less adoption of electric cars as transportation alternative
  
  
• Limited performance of electric vehicles
  
  
• Limited customer market window for the business
  
  
• Leaders have to decide for an essential investment for the charging stations installation at right (Anderson, 2018).

Challenges at Space X

This project called Space-X was introduced to provide an affordable and reusable transportation to the space. Main objective of this project was to increase the space mobility with the help of an affordable space shuttle (Dvorsky, 2018). In this project leaders faced so many challenges like:

• Getting enough business from space travelling agencies like NASA
  
  
• Betting on the risk of being heavily dependent on NASA contracts and their sustainability of business with the agency.
  
  
• Getting other commercial customers for the consumption of their services or products
  
  
• Taking a decision to make the project public which was highly dependent on highly predicted revenue stream.
  
  
• Company was baking on combination of increased demand and cost avoidance to under-price competitors.
• Company was relying on vertical integration – pulling parts and component production in-house.

References

Anderson, C. (2018). Tesla sued over claims it ran man’s dream car project off the road [online]. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/02/tesla-new-zealand-sued-claims-rebuilt-car-not-supported

Dvorsky, G. (2018). SpaceX’s Ambitious Internet Satellite Project Is Set to Launch This Weekend, [online]. Retrieved from: https://gizmodo.com/spacex-s-ambitious-internet-satellite-project-is-set-to-1823004481

Kabisch, N. (2015). Ecosystem service implementation and governance challenges in urban green space planning—The case of Berlin, Germany. Land Use Policy, 42, pp. 557-567.

Nodine, T., & Johnstone, S. M. (2015). Competency-based education: Leadership challenges. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 47(4), pp. 61-66.

Nykvist, B., & Nilsson, M. (2015). The EV paradox–a multilevel study of why Stockholm is not a leader in electric vehicles. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 14, pp. 26-44.