A Big Day - Crossing the Line of Departure

It may sound boring, but to any Marine who has ever done the Marine Corps Planning Process, as of this afternoon, Local Motors is moving out of "Orders Development and Transition" and into Execution. This is an exciting milestone.

To the uninitiated, this mumbo jumbo above means we have:

1) collected our market intelligence,
2) analyzed the situation,
3) formed several broad courses of actions,
4) chosen one,
5) played out its various scenarios on paper,
6) decided on a direction, and
7) broken it down into digestible tasks to execute.

It is at this point that any leader normally saves a little time to catch his breath and to pack his gear before his unit steps into the fight!

So tonight, our team is packing its gear and prepping its tools in order to step across the line of departure beyond which lies our prototype. There is a palpable sense of the unknowable, and a healthy sense of anxiety, but I am confident that we are ready.










I learned as a Marine, that "no plan survives the first shot of battle" (saying attributed to Helmuth von Moltke) and I believe that that wisdom applies here. However, there is a corollary (attributed to my own experience) that "without a first plan you cannot survive the second shot".

So we have planned and we are ready. No doubt the situation will develop and we will adjust. Nonetheless, it is the value of the planning and the thought that will prove its worth. I am proud of our engineering team, our planning cell, and our web team, and they should be proud of themselves. Tonight is a well deserved rest.