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How had this happened? Eric was listening to the managers, who were doing their old-school best to control the flow of information upward (the regurgitation and parsing technique works both ways, as any red-blooded middle manager worth his weight in plausible deniability knows full well). But Larry was listening to the engineers—not directly but via a smart little tool he had implemented called “snippets.” Snippets are like weekly status reports that cover a person’s most important activities for a week, but in a short, pithy format, so they can be written in just a few minutes or compiled (in
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Yet as a leader it is precisely the bad news that you most need to hear. Good news will be just as good tomorrow, but bad news will be worse.
That’s why you must make it safe to ask the tough questions and to tell the truth at all times, even when the truth hurts.
The most important result of all these postmortems is the process itself. Never skip a chance to promote open, transparent, honest communications.
Dory lets anyone directly ask the CEO and his team the toughest questions, while the crowdsourcing aspect of it keeps the lame questions to a minimum.
Eric calls our approach to transparency a “climb, confess, comply” model. Pilots learn that when they get in trouble, the first step is to climb: Get yourself out of danger. Then, confess: Talk to the tower and explain that you screwed up and how. Finally, comply: When traffic controllers tell you how to do it better next time, do it!
Conversation is still the most important and valuable form of communication, but technology and the pace of work often conspire to make it one of the rarest.
As much as top executives and other company bigwigs may profess to be willing to talk, the open door works only when people walk through it. It can be hard for people who don’t know the organization to start that conversation. As a leader, you need to help them.
Here are a few of our basic guidelines for overcommunicating well:
Most management teams are not curious—they are focused on doing the job at hand and tend to keep their communications equally businesslike. Smart creatives, though, have a wide array of interests.
everyone reinforces the flat, meritocratic culture you are
his success as a writer: “I leave out the parts that people
The goals of a board meeting are harmony, transparency, and advice.
“To be a thought leader, you have to have a thought.”
“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”)
Jobs “reality distortion field.”
Steve Jobs saw this future with great clarity. There is no better example of the impact a smart creative can have on the world than him. He embodied a combination of technical depth, artistic and creative talent, and business savvy that allowed him to create computing products with which people actually fell in love. He merged beauty and science in a tech community that had a lot of nerds and business people, but very few artists. The two of us learned a lot about smart creatives from working with and observing Steve, about how much personal style can influence company culture and about how
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Voilà: For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.
Remember, Google was late to the search-engine party, not early.
Do you have the talent to create sustainable differentiation within that evolving world?
Since Google was full of engineers who could build great web-based applications, we had the talent to execute successfully on his insight. Therefore, the context for innovation was perfect.
In other words, Udi’s job was to set up an innovation bureaucracy. That’s pretty much an oxymoron.
“You are going to waste hundreds of engineers’ time to tell them that they have to be innovative. How innovative is that?”)
“Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it.”
What if we started to populate search results while the user was typing the query, rather than waiting for her to hit the return key? We had always believed that speed was one of the core factors in determining the quality of search and were proud that we answered the vast majority of searches in under a tenth of a second.
The product was obviously great for the user, so we all knew that launching it was the best business decision.
As Larry and Sergey put it in their IPO letter, “Serving our end users is at the heart of what we do and remains our number one priority.”
At Google, our users are the people who use our products, while our customers are the companies that buy our advertising and license our technology. There are rarely conflicts between the two, but when there are, our bias is toward the user. It has to be this way, regardless of your industry. Users are more empowered than ever, and won’t tolerate crummy products.
According to Vint, he started this project after asking himself what he could work on that would be needed twenty-five years later.168 His answer: the interplanetary Internet. No one can accuse Vint of not thinking big enough.
Perhaps it’s human nature, or just corporate nature, but most people tend to think incrementally rather than transformationally or galactically.
The obvious benefit of thinking big is that it gives smart creatives much more freedom. It removes constraints and spurs creativity. Astro Teller, the head of Google[x], notes that if you want to create a car that gets 10 percent better mileage, you just have to tweak the current design, but if you want to get one that gets five hundred miles per gallon, you need to start over. Just the thought process—How would I start over?—can spur ideas that were previously not considered.
Saying no lets managers avoid risk and reserve their resources (by “resources,” we mean headcount, or for those of you who speak human, “people”) for projects that are more likely to succeed.
lack of resources forces ingenuity.
As Frank Lloyd Wright once observed, “The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest.”
They knew that workers could not only work, but think too.
In fact, the biggest danger is not the conceit that only managers have good ideas, it’s the conceit that only the company’s employees have them. When we say good ideas come from anywhere, we mean anywhere. They are just as likely to come from outside the company as from inside.
New ideas are never perfect right out of the chute, and you don’t have time to wait until they get there. Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out. Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.
Forgetting sunk costs is a tough lesson to heed, so in a ship-and-iterate model, leadership’s job must be to feed the winners and starve the losers, regardless of prior investment.
As Larry says, if you are thinking big enough it is very hard to fail completely. There is usually something very valuable left over.
Scott Adams says, “It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.”
“Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.”
And at an individual level, people within big companies aren’t rewarded for taking risks, but are penalized for failure. The individual payoff is asymmetrical, so the rational person opts for safety.205
phases. Web 1.0 started in the ’90s with the advent
Better for that discomfort to come from friendly fire than from a competitor intent on killing you for real—as Eric learned at Sun.
Start by asking what could be true in five years. Larry Page often says that the job of a CEO is not only to think about the core business, but also the future; most companies fail because they get too comfortable doing what they have always done, making only incremental changes. And that is especially fatal today, when technology-driven change is rampant.
So the question to ask isn’t what will be true, but what could be true. Asking what will be true entails making a prediction, which is folly in a fast-moving world.208 Asking what could be true entails imagination: What thing that is unimaginable when abiding by conventional wisdom is in fact imaginable?
So forgo conventional wisdom, crank up that imagination, and ask yourself what could happen in your industry in the next five years. What could change most quickly, and what will not change at all? Then once you have an idea of what the future could hold, here are some more hard questions to consider.
How would a very smart, well-capitalized competitor attack the company’s core business? How could it take advantage of digital platforms to exploit weaknesses or skim off the most profitable customer segments? What is the company doing to disrupt its own business? Is cannibalization or revenue loss a frequent reason to kill off potential innovation? Is there an opportunity to build a platform that can offer increasing returns and value as usage grows? Do company leaders use your products regularly? Do they love them? Would they give them to a spouse as a gift? (This obviously isn’t applicable
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When you go through your pipeline of upcoming new major products and features, what percentage of them are built on unique technical insights? How many product people are on the senior leadership team? Does the company aggressively reward and promote the people who have the biggest impact on creating excellent products? Is hiring a top priority at the C-suite level? Do top executives actually spend time on it? Among your stronger employees, how many see themselves at the company in three years? How many would leave for a 10 percent raise at another company? Do your decision-making processes
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Incumbents usually fail to understand how quickly they can be disrupted, but asking these questions can help them discover the reality.
