Tesla is a boundless company. We believe the Boundless Company is the logical evolution of the Connected Company for the digital-first, decentralized-everything world. In this new world, successful companies must continuously scale their capabilities and reach in multiple dimensions to survive and thrive. 

I have written before about how -- based on my interviews with analyst firm, ARK Invest -- Tesla is three to four years ahead of its autonomous vehicle competitors. One of the main reasons for Tesla's dominance is that the company has the most data about its customers. Tesla can provide better insights to insurance companies and also deliver its own services. 

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A boundless company has a different business operating model -- the boundless operating model. Businesses need a new operating model to compete in an AI-powered economy. The traditional operating model is based on the idea that a company is a thing, an entity, or a structure. Boundless organizations are differentiated in their responsiveness to current and future customer needs, market conditions, and associated decision-making and action-taking processes. 

In our book, Boundless , we introduce the Boundless Operating Model, our update to other contemporary sense-and-respond or situational awareness models, as a guide to help organizations design and develop the necessary processes and capabilities for amplifying and accelerating their responsiveness. 

Our model places action and reaction in its context, local or global, and it works at the individual, team, and company levels. The outcome of these considerations is the Boundless Operating Model. The boundless company operates differently, so it requires a new approach to designing its operating model -- and here's why.

First, boundless companies operate as a part of markets, ecosystems, and communities, not apart from them. The idea of a company going it alone is no longer tenable. Identity is not defined in terms of isolation and exclusion but in terms of connectedness and inclusion. From an operating model perspective, we want to show that a boundless company is connected to a larger ecosystem and that everything it does happens within the context of that ecosystem. 

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Second, the traditional sense and respond models focus on sensing immediate and/or local conditions, what is sometimes described as situational awareness. This awareness is critical to effective decision-making processes, but situational awareness alone isn't enough today. Companies must be horizonally aware as well. Horizonal awareness means being connected to the larger world beyond the immediate here and now. Companies need to be able to see 'further down the road' in the same way that an autonomous car can be aware of conditions anywhere along its journey and can take active steps to anticipate and avoid problems, all because of its global as well as local connectedness.

Third, the boundless systems are self-similar at various levels (also known as fractal). Individual resources within a boundless company are themselves boundless and have the same responsibility as the company to be responsive to customer requirements and market conditions. Responses must also be attuned to requirements and conditions and prepared for future changes. And just like the company, when individual employees and teams take action, they do so in the world, not in a vacuum. 

The Boundless Operating Model, or SUDA, is an evolution of other situational awareness or sense-and-respond models designed to reflect dynamically changing conditions, unlike, for instance, the PDCA or Deming Cycle which was designed for continuous improvement in stable conditions or relatively controlled environments. So, how does Tesla represent this SUDA operating model? It's all about movement -- the movement of data that leads to information, insights, knowledge, wisdom, and ultimately better outcomes and experiences.

Tesla (the company), the car (Tesla's hardware product), the FSD (Tesla's software product), and the driver (Tesla's customer) are all connected. They all share data and that data goes both ways -- from the 'car+driver' to the 'company+training system' and back in the form of improvements to the hardware and software. The AI is not developed solely by the company in isolation from its customers. The technology is developed, tested, improved, updated, and distributed in real time, thanks to the constant flow of data.

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FSD is not about AI being used to improve business processes (although we assume Tesla does use AI internally to do that task). FSD is AI being used to transform the customer experience and the entire industry-experience complex of transportation. This is system-level innovation, not task- or activity-level innovation, like automating email generation.