I have so many thoughts today, I am not sure where to begin. First, I continue to be amused by all the CEOs publicly talking about the need to make their companies and teams more “efficient” and productive. We saw it again today when Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced “Simplicity Sprints”—new ways for Googlers to reduce corporate waste. 

I am old enough to remember when CEOs like Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg waxed on about something else: their missions. There was Google’s quest to organize the world’s information, Facebook’s ambition to make the world more open and connected, and so on. I used to roll my eyes at their adherence to these talking points. Now I kinda long for those days again, because efficiency isn’t an end; it is a means. 

I’m a CEO. I think about efficiency a fair amount. But all this commentary to employees about efficiency is a worrisome sign that the largest tech companies have lost sight of their purposes—or perhaps that those purposes don’t have the resonance they once did. More on this later.