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elevator pitch.
As Reid Hoffman, Jonathan’s former colleague at Apple and founding CEO of LinkedIn notes, “Just because a job ends, your relationship with your employee doesn’t have to. … The first thing you should do when a valuable employee tells you he is leaving is try to change his mind. The second is congratulate him on the new job and welcome him to your company’s alumni network.”
Google’s Hiring Dos and Don’ts
From a compensation standpoint, stock options and other forms of equity are quite limited early in your career, so it’s more lucrative to develop expertise in the right industry than to bet on a particular company. Later, as you gain experience (and age!), it becomes more important to pick the right wave. At that point you can start to earn compensation packages with much more equity, so the priority flips.
Statistics is the new plastics Stats are sexy. Deal with it. The sexiest jobs in the Internet Century will involve statistics, and not just in a parallel geeky fantasy world. Hal Varian notes that it is always a good idea for individuals to build expertise in areas that
complement things that are getting cheap, and data, along with computing power to crunch it, is definitely getting cheap. We are in the era of big data, and big data needs statisticians to make sense of it. The democratization of data means that those who can analyze it well will win. Data is the sword of the twenty-first century, those who wield it well, the samurai. So start sharpening that blade, uruwashii,114 and take statistics.
This from our estimable former colleague Sheryl Sandberg: “It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.”
Companies like ours aggregate anonymous signals from mobile phones to provide accurate traffic data in real time.
“bobblehead yes.”
“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”
“bias for action,”
If you want to change people’s behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the argument. We call this the Oprah Winfrey rule.
And since legal issues are bound to crop up when you are moving quickly and changing industries, it always helps to be doing the right thing by consumers and customers.
Have a succession plan
The World’s Best Athletes Need Coaches, and You Don’t?
Here’s a way to think about corporate communications: Picture a twenty-story building. You are on a middle floor, say the tenth, standing on a balcony. The number of people on each floor decreases as you go up. The top floor is occupied by just one person, while the bottom floor, aka the “entry level,” has hordes of people. Now imagine you are standing out on a balcony when the person above you—let’s call her your “boss”—yells something and drops a few documents. You catch them, being careful not to let them flutter away in the wind, and take them back inside to read. There’s some good stuff
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and a paragraph there to your team below, who consume them as if they were the proverbial cold waters to a thirsty soul.136 When they’re done, they turn around and perform their own parsing ritual for the benefit of the thirsty people on eight. Meanwhile, up on eleven, your boss is starting the process all over again. And up on twenty … well, who knows what that guy’s doing.
As the leadership scholars James O’Toole and Warren Bennis note,
many businesspeople who rise to positions of power often get there “not for their demonstrated teamwork but for their ability to compete successfully against their colleagues in the executive suite, which only encourages the hoarding of information.”
(Bill Gates in 1999: “Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared. A company’s values and reward system should reflect that idea.”)
