The Power of Aggressive Goals: Lessons from Elon Musk’s Playbook
Although there have been a number of timelines at Tesla and SpaceX that have been pushed back, and pushed back again, no one can dispute that Tesla has risen to become the definitive dominating automotive giant in the world at an impressively fast speed.
Aggressive outcomes are impossible without aggressive effort…
So where does the aggressive effort come from?
Firstly it comes from the awesomely important missions Elon is embarking on…
And also it comes from the agressive effort because of the aggressive timelines Elon sets for company milestones, combined with many other optimizations.
Because without an optimized work force Elon’s 90,000+ employees would not optimize and deliver their dominating results.
By setting these aggressive timelines engineers and employees must stretch their ability to innovate and work long hours to the limit.
In the Ted Talk “Elon Musk: A future worth getting excited about” TED’s Chris Anderson asks Elon about timelines and says:
“And so in general, when people talk about Elon time, I mean it sounds like you can’t just have a general rule that if you predict that something will be done in six months, actually what we should imagine is it’s going to be a year ot it’s like two-x or three-x, it depends on the type of prediction…
Is there an element that you actually deliberately make aggressive prediction timelines to drive ambitious people to be ambitious? Without that nothing gets done?“
Elon replied: “Well, I generally believe, in terms of internal timelines, that we want to set the most aggressive timeline that we can.
Because there’s sort of like a law of gaseous expansion where, for schedules, where whatever time you set, it’s not going to be less than that. It’s very rare that it’ll be less than that…
But as far as our predictions are concerned what tends to happen in the media is that they will report all the wrong ones and ignore all the right ones.”
And Elon works hard to ensure all of the predictions he makes come true, sooner or later.
Elon certainly seems like an example of how the harder you work the more momentum you can gain.
Elon has led by example and has sometimes worked for so many hours straight when he did sleep he would sleep in the conference room, or even on the factory floor.
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