Most of Google's robotics acquisitions were driven by Andy Rubin, who was trying to build a robotics division within Google. Once he left the company, it probably left their future uncertain.
It's always a bad sign to me when a company's strategy lurches based on who's around rather than on changing external circumstances. It suggests to me that the strategy isn't a coherent, collectively understood plan, but a political balance.
I think it's a stronger phenomenon in cutting edge areas, as there's less group-think to fall back on or use as a crutch.
Everyone knew what to do with a typewriter, even if the visionary leader left. If the person who was saying that microcomputers were going to be the next big thing quit? Nobody else has that idea in their heads.
Is this from a real-world example? Because I'd expect the opposite to be true.
Cutting-edge areas tend to attract people there for the vision. And the harsh commercial realities of innovative markets mean companies get in trouble if they get complacent. Whereas people in larger, older companies in stable markets can let their vision die and just go on doing whatever worked before. At least until it doesn't work, and then they're screwed.
In this instance, Google is a larger, older company.
Or to extend the analogy, if someone goes to IBM as director for New Technology X, and then leaves five years later, what's the likelihood people in New Technology X Division are going to be able take his or her responsibilities over?
Big companies are big companies and they usually don't encourage or reward employees overly much for striking out in a brave new direction. Which is hilarious given that they'll continously try and hire exactly those people externally.
Though I suppose you honestly can't encourage too much rebellion when you make your money from a crank being turned (and happen to need 1,000 bodies to just shut up, turn the crank, and get paid).
I think it's the common mode in American business culture the last few decades, but I think that's a result of the managerialist paradigm that has come to dominate.
Most startups avoid it to begin with. There's a really strong incentive for having a clear mission and high customer focus; many things get easier. Wikipedia has done a good job with "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." Toyota has done a fantastic job organizing around the Toyota Production System. The best restaurants, bakeries, and the like generally have strong shared understandings. The same is often true of multi-generational family firms.
I think even Google did a good job for a long time rallying around "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful". Which makes this especially sad to me. Around the time of Google Plus and "more wood behind fewer arrows" I think there was a culture shift that is probably irreversible.
>> I think it's the common mode in American business culture the last few decades
Agreed. I find it doesn't hold for most contemporary Japanese corporations though. Their leaders tend to be switchable placeholders whose main purpose is to efficiently represent a consensus view.
Interestingly, though they do have momentum, they seem to lack strategic direction. Perhaps only charismatic leaders can provide the latter. Japan can produce such people (e.g. Morita at Sony) but the current environment values continuity over vision.
Very interesting. I suspect that Toyota is a similar result of a visionary leader. I want to believe there's some way to get the benefits of both approaches at scale, but I have yet to see an example.
Do you have anything you'd suggest I read to get a better understanding of the current Japanese situation? Most of my knowledge is about historic Toyota, which I'm sure gives me a distorted view.
Sorry, my opinion is formed only by observation and discussion with related parties. I don't have any direct experience of Toyota, except with one of their trading company's subsidiaries. Uniquely, this company does have a visionary leader at the helm, yet I believe there is no correlation with the parent's leadership style because Toyota Tsucho is run at arms length.
My rather uninformed opinion of Toyota Motors is that they are succeeding exactly as other Japanese companies used to succeed. If this is right, and I hope not, then they may be fated to see the same stagnation in time. A more optimistic view is that Toyota have something unique. If so, I don't believe it to be charismatic leadership. It would be baked into their culture.
Of note is Toyota's recent decision to invest $1B in AI research in Silicon Valley and Boston. They are trying to get ahead of the coming tech for autonomous driving and factory automation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/technology/toyota-silicon-...
Thanks! Yes, I'll be interested to see how Toyota goes. Although many people have taken the TPS lessons and applied them in software, Toyota itself is not one of those companies. (Indeed, their software appears to be terrible. [1]) That makes me think that the visionary leadership that created TPS is long gone, and that they are coasting. But yes, what they're coasting on has a continuous improvement component, so it could be that an advantage is a permanent part of the culture.
It is often true, but not always true. I have worked at or worked with companies that could express their strategy. But usually they are not big multi-division companies like Alphabet.
Yeah, but we're talking about shaping the future here: If you're relying on external circumstances for your hints as to what to do next, you're just reacting to the present....
It makes more sense once you take on a senior level role in those big companies, you start to see how a single, charismatic and convincing person can mentally mobilize (over a period of time) a large group of people to align with their hopes and dreams.
I was baffled by this as well, until I got closer to it and got to see "how the sausage is made".
It is amazing what a confident, strong personality can do in a group of people in _any_ setting.
You probably don't have much experience with larger companies. I envy you for that.
Yes, companies seem such opaque entities from the outside, but they are mostly driven by the wills of the topmost two layers. Remove key players from those layers and you see billions of dollars moving in strange new directions.
Uh .. that was his job. If he didn't do that he would have no job function in the company. If he couldn't change the faith of the company that employed him, then he was a bad employee at that particular job level.
That's what SVP/ director level / C-level people do for a living. They don't barely do any coding or any technical work - they create the vision and hire the people (or buy other companies) to make it real.
I am baffled by the cognitive dissonance here. This kind of single individual driving direction is LITERALLY the intended purpose of these high level roles.
Well, if you think of e.g. Marissa Meyer at Yahoo, big multinationals look like ships with so much momentum even the captain has trouble changing their direction.
Of course, reforming one arm of a business is a lot easier than an entire company, especially if nobody really depends on that arm.
Bill Gates famously "turned the battleship" at Microsoft in 1995 to focus the entire organization on the Internet. They actually did it quickly and succeeded (although more recently have lost their lead). So the right captain can make it happen.
I hear that analogy a lot, but on actual big ships, all the captain has to do is give the word and the ship turns pretty quickly. Maybe slower than a jet ski, but there's only one or two orders of magnitude difference there.
Likewise, sure, a big company has a lot of momentum but it shouldn't take more than a year to realign it.
You actually make a good point. The analogy gets used a lot because big ships do have big turning radiuses. But the better analogy is probably something more along the lines of the captain gives an order and various groups within the ship don't really agree with the order, so they say they're doing their part to make the ship turn but they're really not. Maybe the rudder have been moved a bit but the propellers are acting against the change. Furthermore, some percentage of the crew has decided that the ship should really be a plane and that's what they're working on.
Not really. On a ship (i.e. naval vessel), if the subordinates don't obey the commands, they get sent to prison for mutiny.
In a big organization, if the CEO says to do something (i.e. new vision... PKI's!), most people can ignore it with little chance of reprisal. It's much more of a political/social hierarchy than a military one.
A large company, like any large organization, is not a single thing. It's made up of individual parts, and parts within parts; all of them have different motivations. Frequently the most important competitors for some parts are other parts.
Think of it more like a feudal society. At the best of times, the headman at the top has the loyalty of most of the upper levels, and each of those has the loyalty of most of whoever is beneath them. But each of them has their own desires and plans: what they think will make the organization better or make their position in it better. At worse times, you have the War of the Roses or Game of Thrones sort of stuff.
The problem with bringing in outside organizations, like buying Boston Dynamics, is that they have their own, mostly fixed feudal structures, and integrating them is difficult. (Consider, at the very least, someone is going to go from the king of their own personal world to having to ask before they head to the executive washroom.)
A single person with a vision can have a great effect, because they only have to inspire (or convince) a small group of people around them to go along and that small group will bring along their own people. On the other hand, if the person with vision leaves the organization, whatever they were holding together falls apart pretty quickly.
(My favorite example is the Westinghouse(!)-CBS-Viacom thing.)
A single person can provide vision. A really good leader, gets his followers to want to follow them. If they leave, and nobody steps up to really lead...or if that leaders vision really isn't accepted then the organization is pretty much hosed. You can have the best group of employees in the world, and get by. Perhaps keep innovating for a few years. With an awesome leader at the helm, people show up extra early, they stay late, and they "believe." I've seen it too many times, in the military and civilian tech world. The "reality distortion field" that they speak of Steve Jobs possessing is real, and it's something only some people develop. Find those people and latch on, they'll take you for a fun ride.
I understand everyone comments but still find it not healthy that one man vision cannot be spread so other people around him to continue it even if he is not there anymore. I guess that is because that vision wasn't shared with a lot of people.
This is one of the reasons why BDFLs while being very effective, are also very dangerous. As when there is no equivalent replacement, the entire structure collapses.
There is a limited supply of geniuses. You lose one, all the B-players (that might consider themselves geniuses as well) will make sure you are going to take the wrong turns.
