Foreword
Over time I’ve learned, surprisingly, that it’s tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven’t been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible.
2015年11月20日
Foreword
Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you’ll usually get there. And even if you fail, you’ll probably learn something important.
2015年11月21日
Introduction—Lessons Learned from the Front Row.
As already noted, experimentation is cheap and the cost of failure—if done well—is much lower than it used to be. Plus, data used to be scarce and computing resources precious; today both are abundant, so there’s no need to hoard them .
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong.
we won’t presume to tell you how to create a business plan. But we can tell you with 100 percent certainty that if you have one, it is wrong .
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
most people don’t like uncertainty. Smart creatives, on the other hand, relish the “we’ll figure it out” approach
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
In fact, they won’t trust a plan that claims to have all the answers, but will jump at one that doesn’t, as long as it is built on the right foundation.
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
Another potential source of technical insights is to start with a solution to a narrow problem and look for ways to broaden its scope
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
stay in touch with friends, learn anything about anything, or do the other amazing things we use it for today
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
The most successful leaders in the Internet Century will be the ones who understand how to create and quickly grow platforms
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
A platform is, fundamentally, a set of products and services that bring together groups of users and providers to form multisided markets.66
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
But while Excite@Home was trying to monetize its traffic in every way possible, Google patiently focused on growth. There were plenty of opportunities to cash in; as traffic to Google.com grew rapidly, the company could have followed the lead of every other commercial website and put ads on the home page. But it didn’t. Instead it invested in improving the search engine.
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
Our approach was usually to try to share as much as possible—remember, the priority was to grow, not to make more money
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
You are hurting your user experience, he told them, and that will eventually impact your traffic
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
At the risk of stating the obvious, though, a successful foundation must provide a good basis for revenue generation
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
As they grow and get more valuable, they attract more investment, which helps to improve the products and services the platform supports
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
In the Internet Century, the objective of creating networks is not just to lower costs and make operations more efficient, but to create fundamentally better products
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
Lots of companies build networks to lower their costs, but fewer do so to transform their products or business model
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
Business leaders spend much of their time watching and copying the competition, and when they do finally break away and try something new, they are careful risk-takers, developing only incremental, low-impact changes
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
If you focus on your competition, you will never deliver anything truly innovative. While you and your competitors are busy fighting over fractions of a market-share point, someone else who doesn’t care will come in and build a new platform that completely changes the game.
2015年12月1日
Strategy—Your Plan Is Wrong
In general I think there’s a tendency for people to think about the things that exist. Our job is to think of the thing you haven’t thought of yet that you really need
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Smart coaches know that no amount of strategy can substitute for talent, and that is as true in business as it is on the field. Scouting is like shaving: If you don’t do it every day, it shows
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
This is why we believe that hiring should be peer-based, not hierarchical, with decisions made by committees, and it should be focused on bringing the best possible people into the company, even if their experience might not match one of the open roles
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
When you hire smart creatives, some of them eventually smartly create opportunities for themselves outside the company
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
The smart creatives matter more than the role; the company matters more than the manager
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
A workforce of great people not only does great work, it attracts more great people.90 The best workers are like a herd: They tend to follow each other. Get a few of them, and you’re guaranteed that a bunch more will follow
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
This “herd effect” can cut both ways: While A’s tend to hire A’s, B’s hire not just B’s, but C’s and D’s too. So if you compromise standards or make a mistake and hire a B, pretty soon you’ll have B’s, C’s, and even D’s in your company
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
A positive people herd effect can be orchestrated. “You’re brilliant, we’re hiring,” the phrase adorning Google’s early ads recruiting new employees,91 was a clever Marxist trick. Not Karl, Groucho, since it was designed to inspire a response along the lines of “Yes, I do want to belong to this club that wants me as a member
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
A fine marker of smart creatives is passion. They care
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts. They live it. Passion is more than résumé-deep, because its hallmarks—persistence, grit, seriousness, all-encompassing absorption—cannot be gauged from a checklist
2015年12月1日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
If someone is truly passionate about something, they’ll do it for a long time even if they aren’t at first successful. Failure is often part of the deal. (This is one reason we value athletes, because sports teach how to rebound from loss, or at least give you plenty of opportunities to do so.)
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
The point is not to see if someone was prescient, but rather how she evolved her thinking and learned from her mistakes
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
In the early 2000s, he used to ask candidates “What big trend did you miss about the Internet in 1996? What did you get right, and what did you get wrong?” It’s a deceptively tricky question. It makes candidates define what they expected, link it to what they observed and explore the revelations, and forces them to admit a mistake—and not in the lame, my-biggest-weakness-is-that-I’m-a-perfectionist sort of way. It’s impossible to fake the answer.
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
You must work with people you don’t like, because a workforce comprised of people who are all “best office buddies” can be homogeneous, and homogeneity in an organization breeds failure. A multiplicity of viewpoints—aka diversity—is your best defense against myopia
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who “do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible.
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
the best people are often the ones whose careers are climbing, because when you project their path forward there is potential for great growth and achievement
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
With those candidates, you know exactly what you are getting (which is good) but there is much less potential for the extraordinary (bad). It’s important to note that age and trajectory are not correlated, and that there are exceptions to the trajectory guideline, such as people running their own business or those with nontraditional career paths
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Expanding the aperture brings risks. It leads to some failures, and the start-up costs for hiring a brilliant, inexperienced person are higher than those of hiring a less-brilliant, experienced one
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Establishing a successful hiring culture that delivers a steady stream of outstanding people starts with understanding the role of recruiters in sourcing candidates
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
The most important skill any business person can develop is interviewing
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Being a good interviewer requires understanding the role, reading the résumé, and—most important—considering your questions.
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
You need to ask challenging questions that push the candidate
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Your objective is to find the limits of his capabilities, not have a polite conversation, but the interview shouldn’t be an overly stressful experience
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Questions should be large and complex, with a range of answers (to draw out the person’s thought process) that the interviewer can push back on (to see how the candidate stakes out and defends a position)
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Generic answers to these questions indicate someone who lacks insight on issues
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
For example, “When you are in a crisis, or need to make an important decision, how do you do it?” will often reveal if a candidate is of the “if you want something done, do it yourself” ilk, or if they will rely on the people around them. The former is more likely to get frustrated with the people who work for them and thus hang on to control, the latter more likely to hire great people and have faith in them
2015年12月2日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
The only way to get good at interviewing is to practice. That’s why we tell young people to take advantage of every opportunity to interview.
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
The best packets are like any other great piece of executive communications: a one-page summary with all the key facts, and comprehensive supporting material. The summary consists of hard data and evidence in support of the hiring decision, and the supporting material includes interview reports, résumé, compensation history, reference information (especially if the candidate was sourced via internal reference), and any other relevant material (college transcripts, copy of a candidate’s patents or awards, writing or coding samples)
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
If you want to learn more and get the science behind not just recruiting but all of our people practices, read our colleague Laszlo Bock’s upcoming book, Work Rules! Laszlo runs people operations at Google, and in his book he details how the principles we established in the early days grew into a system that any team or business can emulate.
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
If you want better performance from the best, celebrate and reward it disproportionately
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
exceptional people deserve exceptional pay
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Smart creatives today may not share many characteristics with professional athletes, but they do share one important thing: the potential for disproportionate impact
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
This doesn’t mean you should give new hires a blank check. In fact, the compensation curve should start low. You can attract the best smart creatives with factors beyond money: the great things they can do, the people they’ll work with, the responsibility and opportunities they’ll be given, the inspiring company culture and values, and yes, maybe even free food and happy dogs sitting desk-side
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
The best way to retain smart creatives is to not let them get too comfortable, to always come up with ways to make their jobs interesting.
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Firing instills a culture of fear that will inevitably fail, and “I’ll just fire them” is an excuse for not investing the time to execute the hiring process well
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Career development takes effort and forethought—you need to plan it. This is such an obvious point, yet it’s astonishing how many people who have come to us over the years have failed to do it.
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Here are some simple steps to creating a plan:
Think about your ideal job, not today but five years from now. Where do you want to be? What do you want to do? How much do you want to make? Write down the job description: If you saw this job on a website, what would the posting look like? Now fast forward four or five years and assume you are in that job. What does your five-years-from-now résumé look like? What’s the path you took from now to then to get to your best place?
Keep thinking about that ideal job, and assess your strengths and weaknesses in light of it. What do you need to improve to get there? This step requires external input, so talk to your manager or peers and get their take on it. Finally, how will you get there? What training do you need? What work experience?
By the way, if your conclusion is that you are ready for your ideal job today, then you aren’t thinking big enough. Start over and make that ideal job a stretch, not a gimme.
If you follow these steps, it will work. If you don’t follow them, you will likely prove Yogi Berra’s point that “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going ’cause you might not get there.
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Asking the questions and interpreting the answers is as important a skill as coming up with the answers themselves.
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
Find the best of it and read it. At Google, we always tell people who come to us seeking advice to ingest the founders’ letter from our 2004 IPO and all the internal strategy memos that Eric and Larry subsequently wrote. These are the clearest, most concise explanations of our values and strategy that can be found, yet many people are too busy to read them. Don’t make that mistake. And don’t stop at your company’s borders. The web has a lot of written information, and while much of it is drivel, there is a lot of great stuff too
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
One of the best, easiest ways to get ahead in a field is to know more about it. The best way to do that is to read
2015年12月3日
Talent—Hiring Is the Most Important Thing You Do
You know who reads a lot about their business? CEOs. So think like a CEO and read
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
John Dewey, an American philosopher and writer, said that “a problem well put is half solved
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
But as Berkeley political science professor Raymond Wolfinger once observed, “the plural of anecdote is data,”122 which means, by our interpretation, that if you don’t have data, you can’t decide.
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
When discussing options and opinions, we start the meetings with data. We don’t seek to convince by saying “I think.” We convince by saying “Let me show you.”
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
Slides should not be used to run a meeting or argue a point. They should just contain the data, so that everyone has the same facts
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
So to achieve true consensus, you need dissent. If you are in charge, do not state your position at the outset of the process. The job is to make sure everyone’s voice is heard, regardless of their functional role
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
As General Patton famously said, “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”125 If you’ve hired well, there’s good news: There is dissension in the ranks.
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
As Coach Wooden once said, “Be interested in finding the best way, not in having your own way.”128
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
Many designers also believe a bias for action is a positive force,
2015年12月3日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
It promotes a hands-on, trial-and-error approach: If you’re not sure if a course of action is right, the best thing you can do is try it out and then correct course
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
In general, when you are CEO you should actually make very few decisions. Product launches, acquisitions, public policy issues—these are all decisions that CEOs should make or heavily influence. But there are many other issues where it is OK to let other leaders in the company decide, and intervene only when you know they are making a very bad call
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
a key skill to develop as the CEO or senior leader in a company is to know which decisions to make and which to let run their course without you
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
he asked them, “Which one of you won?” And the response was typical: “Actually, we came up with a new idea.”
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
One of the frustrating aspects of being a leader of smart creatives is how little power you actually have. Look at this chapter so far. Even if you are the CEO of a company, it says, you can’t just pound your fist on a table and dictate decisions (well, you can, but if that’s your modus operandi you will quickly lose most of your smart creatives), and in fact you shouldn’t even make many decisions
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
Scheduling meetings with this frequency lets everyone know the importance of the decision at hand
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
But there is one thing that leaders can still control, and that is the company’s calendar
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
We did the deal, basically on AOL’s terms, and our performance exceeded all of the guarantees. But no one knew this at the time we were in negotiations; we got to the right answer through a rigorous, time-intensive process of considering all the details
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
At first they didn’t make much progress. But the sheer drudgery of repeating the same argument every day helped spur the team to delve even deeper into the data we had on how our ads engine was performing, and over the weeks we performed analyses that demonstrated that the deal wasn’t as risky as we had originally thought
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
A meeting between two groups of equals often doesn’t result in a good outcome, because you end up compromising rather than making the best tough decisions. Include someone more senior as the decision-maker.
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
Meetings should be manageable in size. No more then eight people, ten at a stretch (but we would seriously discourage this). Everyone in the room should be able to give their input
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
And if people have so many meetings that they can’t get work done, then there is a simple solution: Prioritize and go to fewer meetings.
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
You have to focus on your core business. You have to love it.
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
When Eric became CEO of Novell in 1997, he got some great advice from Bill Gates: Spend 80 percent of your time on 80 percent of your revenue
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
Loving a business means having a plan for leaving it, but leaders often neglect to think about who will succeed them
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
Whenever you watch a world-class athlete perform, you can be sure that there is a great coach behind her success. It’s not that the coach is better at playing the sport than the player, in fact that is almost never the case. But the coaches have a different skill: They can observe players in action and tell them how to be better
2015年12月4日
Decisions—The True Meaning of Consensus
The first ingredient of a successful coaching relationship is a student who is willing to listen and learn
2015年12月4日
Communications—Be a Damn Good Router
Leadership’s purpose is to optimize the flow of information throughout the company, all the time, every day. This is an entirely different skill set.
2015年12月4日
Communications—Be a Damn Good Router
The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them
2015年12月5日
Communications—Be a Damn Good Router
Even when you ask the right questions, the true details can be hard to get
2015年12月5日
Communications—Be a Damn Good Router
One of Eric’s most basic rules is sort of a golden rule for management: Make sure you would work for yourself
2015年12月5日
Communications—Be a Damn Good Router
At least once per year, write a review of your own performance, then read it and see if you would work for you. And then, share it with the people who do in fact work for you.
2015年12月5日
Communications—Be a Damn Good Router
Remember the old OHIO acronym: Only Hold It Once. If you read the note and know what needs doing, do it right away. Otherwise you are dooming yourself to rereading it, which is 100 percent wasted time
2015年12月5日
Communications—Be a Damn Good Router
Handle email in LIFO order (Last In First Out). Sometimes the older stuff gets taken care of by someone else
2015年12月5日
Communications—Be a Damn Good Router
We have always made it clear that we have no permanent enemies and that we will judge other countries, including Communist countries, and specifically countries like Communist China, on the basis of their actions and not on the basis of their domestic ideology
2015年12月5日
Communications—Be a Damn Good Router
Eric believes in the three-week rule: When you start a new position, for the first three weeks don’t do anything. Listen to people, understand their issues and priorities, get to know and care about them, and earn their trust
2015年12月5日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
At Apple—just like Google—the leaders are product people with technical backgrounds
2015年12月5日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
To us, innovation entails both the production and implementation of novel and useful ideas. Since “novel” is often just a fancy synonym for “new,” we should also clarify that for something to be innovative it needs to offer new functionality, but it also has to be surprising. If your customers are asking for it, you aren’t being innovative when you give them what they want; you are just being responsive. That’s a good thing, but it’s not innovative
2015年12月5日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Google[x] has a simple Venn diagram that it uses to determine if it will pursue an idea. First, the idea has to be something that addresses a big challenge or opportunity, something that affects hundreds of millions or billions of people. Second, they have to have an idea for a solution that is radically different from anything currently in the market
2015年12月5日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
And third, the breakthrough technologies that could bring that radical solution to life have to be at least feasible, and achievable in the not-too-distant future
2015年12月5日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it
2015年12月6日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Derek calls this the “first follower” principle: When creating a movement, attracting the first follower is the most crucial step. “The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.”
2015年12月6日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Optimism is an essential ingredient for innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in a safe place?
2015年12月6日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Hire people who are smart enough to come up with new ideas and crazy enough to think they just might work. You need to find and attract those optimistic people, then give them the place to create change and adventure.
2015年12月6日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Focus on the user… and the money will follow. This can be particularly challenging in environments where the user and customer are different, and when your customer doesn’t share your focus-on-the-user ethos.
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
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
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
It can also be easier to take on big problems because bigger challenges attract big talent. There is a symbiotic relationship between big challenges and highly smart, skilled people: The challenges get solved and the people get happy. Give the wrong people a big challenge, and you’ll induce anxiety. But give it to the right people, and you’ll induce joy.170
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
The trick is to find the sweet spot by creating objectives that look difficult but are actually easily doable
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
That started a lengthy discussion, the end result of which was that 70/20/10 became our rule for resource allocation: 70 percent of resources dedicated to the core business, 20 percent on emerging, and 10 percent on new
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
And 10 percent isn’t a lot of resources, which is fine, because overinvesting in a new concept is just as problematic as underinvesting, since it can make it much harder to admit failure later on. Million-dollar ideas are a lot harder to kill than thousand-dollar ones, so overinvestment can create a situation wherein willful confirmation bias—the tendency to see only the good things in projects in which a lot has been invested—obscures sound decision-making.
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Ten percent also works because creativity loves constraints
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
A lack of resources forces ingenuity
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
The first step toward bringing a good idea to fruition is to build a team of people who are committed to it, and while we may be clueless, your peers probably are not. Our constant advice to anyone who wants to launch a 20 percent project is to start by building a prototype, because that’s how you get people excited about the project. Coming up with an idea is pretty easy. Getting a few of your colleagues to join your project and add their 20 percent time to your 20 percent time is a lot harder
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Steve Jobs once told Eric that he did something similar when he was running NeXT. Every six months or so, the engineering team would stop what they were doing and dedicate themselves to creating applications for the NeXT platform. This was a critical tactic to building their ecosystem, but it also gave everyone fresh insights into the work they were doing in their “day jobs.”
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Morph ideas, don’t kill them: Most of the world’s great innovations started out with entirely different applications, so when you end a project, look carefully at its components to see how they might be reapplied elsewhere. As Larry says, if you are thinking big enough it is very hard to fail completely
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Author and professor Nassim Taleb writes about making systems that are “antifragile”: They don’t just survive failures and external shocks, they get stronger as a result.192 Don’t get us wrong: Failure is not the objective. But, if you are measuring the health of your innovation environment, you need to count the failures as well as the successes, to become more “antifragile
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
The key is to iterate very quickly and to establish metrics that help you judge if, with each iteration, you are getting closer to success. Small failures should be expected and allowed, since they often can shed light on the right way to proceed
2015年12月7日
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
We don’t provide any monetary incentive for 20 percent projects for the simple reason that we don’t need to: It may sound corny, but the reward comes from the work itself
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
Sometimes the most effective way to help change and innovation outrun the antibodies of corporate entropy is a simple one: Ask the hardest question. Understanding what you do about the future, what do you see for the business that others may not, or may see but choose to ignore? (Harvard Business School Professor and business consultant Clayton Christensen: “I keep my attention on the questions I need to ask so I can catch the issues of the future.”
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
What would the company do when the advantage to which it owed most of its success and profitability was gone? When Eric posed that question to President Owen Brown and CEO Scott McNealy, their conclusion was that Sun could never lower their costs to be competitive with the PC industry. In other words, they didn’t have a good answer (and neither did Eric). That was a problem of course, but the bigger problem is what happened next: Nothing
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
In ongoing companies there are always hard questions, and they often don’t get asked because there aren’t any good answers and that makes people uncomfortable. But this is precisely why they should be asked—to keep the team uncomfortable. Better for that discomfort to come from friendly fire than from a competitor intent on killing you for real—as Eric learned at Sun. If there aren’t good answers to the hardest questions, then there is at least a silver lining. Those hardest questions that have no easy answers can be very effective in mitigating the risk-averse, change-fighting tendencies of big-company culture
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
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
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
So the question to ask isn’t what will be true, but what could be true.
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
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 in a lot of cases, but it’s a powerful thought experiment.) Do your customers love your products? Or are they locked in by other factors that might evaporate in the future? If they weren’t locked in at all, what would happen? (Interesting corollary to this question: If you forced your product people to make it easy for customers to ditch your product for a competitor’s, how would they react? Could they make your products so great that customers want to stay, even if they don’t have to?)
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 lead to the best decisions, or the most acceptable ones?
How much freedom do employees have? If there is someone who is truly innovative, does that person have the freedom to act on his ideas, regardless of his level? Are decisions on new ideas based on product excellence, or profit?
Who does better in the company, information hoarders or routers? Do silos prevent the free flow of information and people?
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
These are tough questions, and there are likely no obvious solutions to the problems they spotlight. But there certainly won’t be solutions if the questions never get asked
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
Incumbents usually fail to understand how quickly they can be disrupted, but asking these questions can help them discover the reality
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
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.
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
As Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian note in Information Rules, information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.211
2015年12月8日
Conclusion—Imagine the Unimaginable
We see most big problems as information problems, which means that with enough data and the ability to crunch it, virtually any challenge facing humanity today can be solved