The Trade Off

This trade off way of thinking about design is central to strategy.

The lesson from systems engineering at JPL was that performance is the joint outcome of capability and clever design.  In particular, given existing capabilities, such as rocket throw weight or power supply efficiency, to get more performance out of a system you have to integrate its components and subsystems more cleverly and more tightly.  

On the other hand, if capabilities (technologies) could be improved the demand for tight, clever integration was lessened.  That is, more powerful booster rockets or lighter components would let us meet the weight constraint with less work on tight integration.  This trade off way of thinking about design is central to strategy.

ACTION POINT:  Understand the balance between capabilities and clever design.