Today’s Chapter is based on the book “The Bugatti Story”, a biography of Ettore Bugatti, the founder of Automobiles E. Bugatti, written by his daughter Ebe Bugatti.
Here’s what I have learned from the book:
Power of Observation
“Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation of life.”
— Marcus Aurelius
Ettore Bugatti is known for being the founder of Automobiles E. Bugatti as an automobile designer and manufacturer. However, Bugatti was not a qualified engineer. In fact, he received no technical education and had no diplomas in engineering. However, what he did have was a great sense of observation. Along with experience, his power of observation allowed him to obtain a natural mechanical ability that helped him build great cars.
In fact, Bugatti’s career as an automobile designer started when some friends of his father asked him to try out a motortricycle made by Prinetti and Stucchi. Just by looking at the machine, Bugatti was able to understand all the technicalities behind its mechanism.
While Bugatti may have lacked in formal education in mechanics, he overcame it with his attention to details due to his strong sense of observation. Bugatti, just by handing a car part, could understand what could be improved on in his engines and cars.
When asked about the importance of a good sense of observation, Bugatti responded with the following, "It is by observation that one can penetrate into the nature of things.” He also expresses how great minds like Leonardo da Vinci also succeeded due to their sense of observation:
"Powers of observation are indispensable in order to produce anything. Perhaps I can better explain what I mean by referring to the arts. Leonardo da Vinci had wonderful powers of observation; he could reproduce with exactitude something which today we would take a magnifying glass to; he could catch movement as the camera does now, and at the same time he gave the illusion of life to his sketches, something that photography is unable to do.”
— Ettore Bugatti
Furthermore, Bugatti mentions that a good sense of observation is important because ”observation is at the base of all progress and improvements in mechanics.” As a matter of fact, Bugatti is a believer that it would be foolish for one to ignore the work of others as it can provide great insights and by consequence, faster innovation.
As Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on shoulders of giants.” In a similar way, Bugatti explains that "Faster progress would be made in all fields if conceit did not cause us to forget or disdain the work done by others before us. There is a tendency to believe that nothing worthy of note has been done in the past, and this has an unfortunate bearing on our judgment; thus the present trend toward mediocrity, not because it would cost more to do better but because we do not know how to do better.”
This reminds me of what we have learned from a fellow car engineer, Henry Royce, one of the co-founders of Rolls Royce. As we have learned previously, Royce’s success in the car industry came from his power of observation and experimentation. As a matter of fact, without any experience with motor car and no experience in manufacturing, experimentation and observation was the only way he could learn. He would sit for hours watching the working of an exhaust valve and would spend hours breaking down a little French car and to put it back pieces by pieces again and again. He also made his own experiment upon experiment: “he smashed things up, drove parts to the breaking-stage that he might study the limits of their endurance. He insisted as he always did upon the perfection both of material and of finish.”
While Royce didn’t do anything revolutionary in his work on motor cars, it is his attention to even the smallest detail that made his products superior to others. His attention and thoroughness to details turned him into a man that was always consistently trying to find ways of improving small components of the car. But accumulatively, similarly to a snowball, the small improvements led his motor cars being far and away better than anybody else.
Finally, while improvements made to mechanical constructions often resulted from his power of observation, Bugatti mentions that it is also important to be able to put ideas into execution. As Steve Jobs once said, "To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions."
For Bugatti, the first step starts by putting ideas down on paper, as it would help visualise things from all angles:
“The drawing board enables me to see in completed form whatever it is that I am about to make, but I often think that one should not put pencil to paper before having visualized what one wants to do from all angles. Over the years and after much experience in drawing quite novel and complicated things in pocket-books, I have come to work by a series of mental images; and the drawing board enables me to give effect to those images. A technician who cannot put down his ideas on paper is at a great disadvantage.”
— Ettore Bugatti
This reminds me of the importance of putting things down in writing. In fact, the importance of writing can also be seen in the way of learning. By writing about a topic at hand, you must be able to compress your ideas into words which requires both understanding and thinking. As such, writing is a great process to understand things better yourself and to identify the topics that you understand from those that you do not know what you are talking about.
Finally, writing is a great tool for better decision making. In fact, by keeping a decision journal at hand, you will be able to collect feedbacks from your previous decisions in the hope of making better decisions in the future. Writing it down on a journal is crucial as it allows you to review all the circumstances and accessible knowledge you had at the time of your decision and to truly evaluate it without being obstructed by hindsight bias.
“Go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think.
The key to doing this is that it prevents something called hindsight bias, which is no matter what happens in the world, we tend to look back on our decision-making process, and we tilt it in a way that looks more favorable to us, right? So we have a bias to explain what has happened.”
— Daniel Kahneman
Quality over Quantity
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
— Steve Jobs
Ettore Bugatti was fundamentally an artist and this did not change when he started working in the car industry. While other car manufacturers were focused in manufacturing cars at a large scale and at a lower costs in order to maximize profits, Bugatti was focused on building a car that would be perfected down to the smallest details. As a matter of fact, Bugatti’s cars were known for producing cars with perfect finish and precision.
Similar to an artist, the car was Bugatti’s way of expressing his artistic and independent outlook as it allowed him a freedom to invent. Bugatti paid no attention to what his rival car manufacturers were doing nor was he interested in knowing the trend or tastes of the public. He wanted to build his own car and production costs and profits were only secondary to him. As Ebe Bugatti once said about her father, “he [Ettore Bugatti] was more concerned to create than to produce.”
This concept of intertwining art with manufacturing reminds me of this saying from Edwin Land: “Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.” As we have learned previously from Steve Jobs, beauty and details matters when manufacturing a product. As a matter of fact, Jobs built his first computer with his friend Steve Wozniak because they wanted to use one, but they could not afford one at that time. And that’s what led them to start Apple as no other companies were interested in building personal computers.
Therefore, Steve Jobs built Apple with one principle in mind: to build products that they would want to use themselves. As a matter of fact, this is how the iPhone got to be created; it was driven by the fact that they all hated their phones and wanted to build a phone that they could use.
As such, it was important for Jobs for the product to be beautiful if he was going to use it, perhaps, due to his background in liberal art. He believed that it didn’t take that much more to put out a well-designed product except a little more time. In fact, even if he knew it was going to sell well as it is, he was not willing to put out a product that looked like garbage.
As Steve Jobs once said, “But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it’s really great.”
“Steve gave a speech once, which is one of my favorites, where he talked about, in a certain sense, “We build the products that we want to use ourselves.” And so he’s really pursued that with incredible taste and elegance that has had a huge impact on the industry.“
— Bill Gates
Furthermore, the story of how Ettore Bugatti achieved success as car manufacturer despite going against the common practice of becoming a mass-scale low cost car producer reminds me of the importance of finding one’s niche. In biology, a niche refers to the role a particular species plays in its environment. This includes things like what it eats, where it lives, what eats it, and how it reproduces. Every species has its own unique niche that helps it survive and thrive in its ecosystem.
Similarly, specialized businesses can thrive by catering to a smaller niche market. Once they own the niche, they can be incredibly hard to dislodge. As a matter of fact, there is very little incentive for other businesses to invest in a developing a competing product due to the size of the market.
As we have learned previously from Isadore Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons, who was able to create one of the largest hotel chain in history despite competing with various existing giants in the industry such as Holiday Inn and Marriott by specializing. As such, he decided to fully focus on midsize hotels of exceptional quality to offer a differentiated product compared to the rest of the industry.
“Holiday Inn had created an empire on U.S. highways, first through standardized rooms, then by becoming “the host with the most,” the first to offer free cribs, dog kennels, soft drinks, and ice machines. Marriott had found a profitable niche in suburban complexes, between the new roadside motels and the older downtown hotels. I believed we could do as well, maybe better. All we had to do was stand out from the clutter, be distinctive.” — Isadore Sharp
Testing
“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is necessary.”
— Elon Musk
As we have mentioned previously, Ettore Bugatti’s career as a car manufacturer started by testing a motortricycle and by altering it and judging his modifications through racing it. In fact, he decided to build his own car when he realized that there were too many imperfections with the existing ones and he had to things himself.
Similar to Enzo Ferrari, Bugatti also believed that car racing was a great way to show the quality of his own cars and enabled him to improve on them. As we have learned previously, Enzo Ferrari first started in the car making business as Scuderia Ferrari, the racing team under Alfa Romeo. He believed that Ferrari was a good opportunity for Alfa Romeo to gain full report on the behaviour and performance of their cars. As a matter of fact, Ferrari once said that, “It is a recognized fact that races are useful because they stimulate technological progress.”
As such, Ferrari was always in constant innovation and experimentation in order to create a superior car after every season. He explained that “we must inevitably replace it [last year’s racing car] if we are to continue keeping just that little bit ahead.” From 1946 to the day the book was written, Ferrari made over 131 prototypes of engines.
Ferrari believed that car manufacturers should make great use of racing as an opportunity for experimentation of new cars, as customers are the ones who benefit directly from it:
“That is why I think that racing, which does so much in quality improvement, brings speedier advantages to a firm that is not a very big one. The customers benefit directly from this dual activity of the smaller concern, for all the innovations learnt from racing experience can find practical application in the normal production models in a relatively short period of time, the smaller output enabling them, in fact, to be introduced much more readily.”
— Enzo Ferrari
In the same line of thought, Rudolf Uhlenhaut of Mercedes once declared that "The manufacturers who build sport cars are able to make more rapid technical progress, since the designer may risk applying new and very advanced ideas, which he could not do were he designing an ordinary family car for mass production."
In fact, Enzo Ferrari reiterate that the race track allows car manufacturers to try out new inventions and to avoid discarding new improvements “before its real possibilities were fully ascertained.” He explains that most evolutions and development of cars can only achieved under “the most abnormal and extreme conditions of use”, hence the necessity of a racing. One of Ferrari’s pleasure was to deconstruct a car after finishing a race to see how the components have held up.
“When, at the end of a Grand Prix race, a constructor dismantles a car that has won a place and finds its component parts at the limit of their endurance through wear and tear, then may he truly claim that he has followed the new formula, and followed it indeed to the limits of human foresight and endeavour.”
— Enzo Ferrari
However, what differentiated Ferrari and Bugatti was that for Ettore, it was unthinkable for customers to not be able to purchase the same cars that were competing on the race track. In fact, due to cost reasons, “Bugatti was the only car manufacturer to market his racing cars alongside his sports models, with both possessing the same features.”
Bugatti mentions that "This is a pity for the customer (still the same one). And this is where I would ask you to pay a short visit to my factory, to see for yourself what you would not find in any other car factory in the world-that my racing cars are production models just like my sports cars, and that even my tourers have the same engines and mechanism as my racing cars, are built of the same materials and are assembled by the same workmen.”
Furthermore, Bugatti was much more than just a car manufacturer. It is fair to say that Bugatti was an inventor more than anything. In fact, it is said that between 1905 and 1908, Bugatti applied for and was granted more patents in Germany than anyone else. Not only did he make huge innovations in terms of car parts, he was patented with “a number of milling machines, turret lathes, slide lathes, cutting machines, beveling tools and drills.”
For Bugatti, if he was to make precise and detailed cars, he would need to have the perfect tools to do so. What better way, than to create your own. As such, his factory not only produced car parts, they also produced the machines to make those parts.
Finally, it is fair to say that Bugatti was always encouraging consistent innovation and was never fully satisfied with his cars. As he once said, "Obviously, it is tempting to stop when you've made some progress, but if you want to follow it up you can't stop. That is why I shall go on, as long as I'm able. I know you can't always win; but when I'm beaten I shall know why, and I'll beat my rival later on.”
Beyond the Book
Read "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" by Farnam Street
Read "Writing to Think" by Farnam Street