Disruption

A few months ago, one of Google's employees posted a rant about how Google was messing up in a significant way in their overall strategy:

That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.

Any employee at a normal company would have been worried about losing his job. He took down the post soon after he realized what he had done. Interestingly, though, Google didn't force him to; in fact, he says they weren't in any way negative about the public posting:

I contacted our internal PR folks and asked what to do, and they were also nice and supportive. But they didn't want me to think that they were even hinting at censoring me -- they went out of their way to help me understand that we're an opinionated company, and not one of the kinds of companies that censors their employees. That was cool and all, but I still didn't know what to do.

He took the post down anyway, but of course in this day and age it was shared and copied and, well, out there for good. Taking it down didn't do anything to minimize the sharing of the message.

But the coolest thing is this:

Amazingly, nothing bad happened to me at Google. Everyone just laughed at me a lot, all the way up to the top, for having committed what must be the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history.

But they also listened, which is super cool. I probably shouldn’t talk much about it, but they’re already figuring out how to deal with some of the issues I raised. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, though. When I claimed in my internal post that “Google does everything right”, I meant it. When they’re faced with any problem at all, whether it’s technical or organizational or cultural, they set out to solve it in a first-class way.

In other words, this is a company that truly 'gets it' when it comes to idea sharing and the importance of differing opinions. Instead of firing him for publicly airing his frustration and internal strategy and behavior, they took the opportunity to self-reflect and decide what, if anything, needed to be done to make the company better.

If you generally understand tech and/or are interested in the business decisions being made in the industry, the rant itself is a fantastic read. If not, though, it isn't the point. The point is that Google's response was what any company should do: listen, assess, adapt. Contrast that with what most companies would have done: fire the employee and engage damage control.

The more I study Google, the more impressed I am.

I know I'm a little late getting the word out, but if you own a website, you should be striking against SOPA today. It's pretty easy to set up, just add a JavaScript snippet to your homepage and it will do the right thing both today (striking) and tomorrow (when it's over)... see the link for details on what to do.

Wikipedia (which, by the way, is striking by making all pages except two unavailable today) has more about SOPA and what it is.

Sometimes it's important to push your fears aside and experience the world. Scott Adams spent the last year doing just that:

As 2011 approached, I wondered what would happen if, for the next 12 months, I said yes to any opportunity that was new or dangerous or embarrassing or unwise. I decided to find out.

Do you say 'yes' to opportunities in your life?

Businesses are starting to realize that the key to becoming competitive is knowing how to analyze all the data they have available. This means a shift in what skills are valuable to a company:

Then the third thing, which is the subtlest but perhaps the most important, is cultural change about how to use data. A lot of companies think they’re using data, and you often see bar charts and pie charts and numbers in management presentations. But, historically, that kind of data was used more to confirm and support decisions that had already been made, rather than to learn new things and to discover the right answer. The cultural change is for managers to be willing to say, “You know, that’s an interesting problem, an interesting question. Let’s set up an experiment to discover the answer.”

Want a degree that makes you marketable? Try sociology or psychology:

Having enough data to get a statistically significant result is not a problem. There’s plenty of data. So the skills often have more to do with sampling methodologies, designing experiments, and working these very, very large data sets without becoming overwhelmed. If you look inside companies, you also see a transformation in the functions that are using data.

We've definitely entered an era where the computer is just a tool; programmers are not the millionaires of the future, they are the blue-collar workers. The people who know how to make sense of the data are the ones who will define (and are already building) the next generation of wealth.

It's that time of year again, time to fall back (at least if you are in the US... well, some parts of the US):

A fantastic talk about the necessary evolution of cities in light of the current state of the earth:

I often use Google as an example of brilliance in business, technology, and innovation. Their culture teaches a new way of looking at the world, at inventing and evolving and staying ahead of the competition. The question is, can this culture be created elsewhere? Forbes weighs in:

Should we look to Google (the company, not the search engine) for lessons on economic growth and employment? Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, and until last April Google’s chief executive, thinks what he’s got goes way beyond Google’s campus.

 

“Google proved that you could systematize innovation,” he told me recently, adding  that this meant you could “create an environment where are asking why things are the way they are, and wondering if they can be done in a different way — where you look outside your own field for an idea.”

Actually, I'm jealous... I want to try:

It's a well-understood but little-practiced fact that unexpected behaviors lead people to pay attention, learn, and change their behavior. Here's a great demonstration of what to do differently, in infographic form: