What's the Point of a Company Anyways?

How often do you take a step back from your company or your work and ask yourself why you're doing it in the first place?

Watching Elon Musk's interview with the Wall Street Journal today kicked me into one of these moments. A good reminder of how important it is to zoom out, scale back, and focus on what really matters.

The quotes that really stuck with me...

"Do our CEO's in corporate America focus enough on product improvement? I think the answer is no ... Spend more time just trying to make your product as amazing as possible"

How much time do you spend trying to get a bunch of cogs in order?

How much time do you spend trying to achieve the mirage of the "4 hour workweek?"

What would it mean in your own context to be "on the front lines" or "on the factory floor" of your business?

How much do you focus on selling or marketing your products and services, vs. making them continuously better - innovating them for maximum impact?

"There should be more focus on the product itself, less time on board meetings, less time on financials," Musk says. And it's hard to disagree with him.

Because what could be more useful to our companies than innovating how good the product is? (Once the market has clearly shown that yes - they want this).

"Why do we even have companies? A company is an assembly of people gathered together to deliver a product or service. .. a company has no value in and of itself. A company has value to the degree that it is an effective allocator of resources to create goods and services that are of greater value than the cost of the inputs."

"Make your product better, this is the thing that really matters"

Here's the full interview, worth a watch.