A conversation with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt
Here are outtakes from my notes on Eric Schmidt’s talk at the Future of Management conference (see Part 4):
“The culture defines the outcome,” in reference to the products and services Google creates.
“If you have enough direct reports you can’t manage them effectively! That was the goal.”
The company’s three most senior managers, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, review every hire, from 60 to 100 a week. “Management experience is viewed as a negative when it comes to new hires.”
“This is a culture that is very hard to describe, but you know it when you are in it. Every issue, no matter how small, is debated, sometimes endlessly. Every decision needs dissent — you don’t get a good decision without dissent. But every decision needs a deadline.”
“The number one goal of the company is end-user happiness with search; the number two goal of the company is user happiness with advertising. Building the Google network is number three; number four is scaling the business. Shareholder value is the consequence of the effective execution of these goals.”
“Most businesses are not consumer focused. Most business is essentially focused on maximizing the wrong things.”
Google’s management has super-majority voting control over the stock, to ensure that the company’s purpose survives in perpetuity.
When I asked if, “Do no evil” is an accurate expression of the company’s aspiration, Eric answered, “It’s a conversation starter, it creates dialogue and discourse.” Sadly, this seemed like a woefully inadequate answer!
I followed up with the question, “What do you hope Google’s impact will be on the world, five to ten years from now?”
Eric’s reply: “Google should be able to answer the question, ‘What should I do tomorrow,’ and Goggle should be able to give you some suggestions. It should be able to help a student make a paper they are writing longer — if they ask Google to do it, Google will make the paper longer. They should be able to ask Google, ‘What should I be writing about?’ And as you write, Google will tell you what you should be writing.”
No values here!
Eric continued, “The future is ambiguous, the only answer is to hire the smartest people.”
“The only way to keep your job as a CEO is to increasingly generate absolute profits. It doesn’t matter if you demoralize the company in the process.”
“Most CEO’s don’t really understand the business they are in and what it takes to be successful.”
At Google, there is something called “Snippets,” a site where each week, every engineer posts a summary of personal actions and accomplishments. This is just one of the ways that Google forges links between its highly independent, lightly supervised teams.
Over and over, Eric stressed the essential importance of listening, and the huge extent to which most leaders are poor listeners. He also accepts the idea that if the “group” disagrees with a hire he wants to make, he can’t make the hire, even though he is the CEO. He is not an “imperial” CEO.
Eric struck me as extremely honest, direct, and authentic. Yet at the same time, self-deprecating. His style couldn’t hide the arrogance that emanates from his great success. He clearly had zero interest in winning the audience’s approval.
When you consider that Google is one of the world’s most powerful companies, its lack of a clear moral purpose and its frequently value-neutral stance was scary and disappointing. “Do no evil” doesn’t cut it for me.