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“Thank god, someone around here is finally asking the tough questions!” they will say. “Now we can get started on finding the answers.”
They find that they can have a far greater impact from California than from their home country, and the allure of gathering with other smart creatives of the same ilk often outweighs that of staying close to home.
Do I go to the smart creatives, or find a way to get them to come to me?
If data empirically show that a new way of doing things is better than the old way, then the role of government isn’t to prevent change but to allow the disruption to occur.
As Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian note in Information Rules, information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.
Google has a product called Fusion Tables, which is designed to “bust your data out of its silo” by allowing related data sets to be merged and analyzed as a single set, while still retaining the integrity of the original data set. Think of all the research scientists in the world working on similar problems, each with their own set of data in their own spreadsheets and databases.
Speed is another hopeful factor. Thanks to technology, latency—the time between action and reaction—is getting much shorter.
And each one of these changes will be fomented by a small team of determined, empowered smart creatives. This is what we believe.
As much as we try to stay on top of technology and how it impacts our industry, we simply can’t grasp it the way the next generation of smart creatives does.
Many of the brilliant things that made Google so great—the strategy, culture, and emphasis on hiring excellence—were set well before either of us joined the company.
Over and over, Larry and Sergey pushed hard to challenge convention, question authority and incumbency, and go their own way in building a truly great company. Google
“If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.” Quoted in Mark Milian, “Why Apple Is More Than Just Steve Jobs” (CNN Digital Biz blog, August 25, 2011).
