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Regardless of what specific reasons he has or hasn't for accepting this move, this is fascinating from an organisational perspective. With a significant part o

Regardless of what specific reasons he has or hasn't for accepting this move, this is fascinating from an organisational perspective. With a significant part of senior leadership replaced, what will happen to Uber's work place culture? As in, can culture in such a large organisation be changed top down? Are there any examples where an organisation has changed on a short time scale? I am thinking of the Ballmer/Nadella transition but in my (outsider) perception it took years for Microsoft to be viewed differently as a company. There is also an aspect of bringing in an outsider versus letting an insider take over.

nostrademons 9y ago
Culture always changes when the CEO is replaced. The culture of Google changed noticeably when Eric Schmidt stepped aside for Larry Page, and I've heard it's changed again now that Sundar is CEO (ironically, it seems closer to the Schmidt era now, but without the perks & engineering freedom). The culture of YCombinator changed when Paul Graham stepped aside for Sam Altman. It does take a couple years to take hold though. I remember that when Larry took over Google in 2011, it was largely business as usual at first, but there was a noticeable shift by the time I left in 2014.
- amyjess 9y ago
  Can you go into detail about how the culture changed? I'm curious.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    From Eric -> Larry: - "More wood behind fewer arrows". This was actually a Steve Jobs principle that Larry adopted: kill off all your insignificant products to focus on just a few key areas. - More willingness to take on moonshots; less tolerance for projects that might be good for a small segment of the userbase, but don't appreciably move the needle. - Seemingly less collegial atmosphere. Eric tolerated a lot of "You'll do your thing, I'll do mine, and it's okay if Google has half a dozen products that all do slight variations of each other." Larry insisted on more product discipline, but that often meant more of a scarcity mentality among execs, which led to more turf wars and infighting. - More top-down culture. Eric had few opinions on what Google should be doing, he just wanted to make sure we were doing it well. Larry had very definite opinions on what Google should be doing, and if you didn't share them, go start your own company. - More chaotic management style. I got the sense that Larry didn't actually know what was going on with the company, on an individual-contributor level, and so when he made decisions, they often made no sense to the rest of the company. Eric didn't know what was going on with the company either, but he was okay with that, as long as the money kept coming in and we didn't do anything illegal, so he made fewer decisions that weren't a direct reaction to an issue that was brought to him. From Larry -> Sundar. Keep in mind that I left before Sundar became CEO, so this is all second-hand: - Hierarchy and top-down culture has persisted. - Collegiality seems to have returned. Just my perception, but Google seems a nicer place to work now than when G+ was seemingly taking over the company in 2012. - Sundar is generally more informed and, well, sane, as perceived by the employees. - Sundar is a caretaker: the core areas of Google are explicitly designed not to require massive company-changing innovation, instead relying on incremental improvement to existing products that can be driven by middle-management, and all the innovation is shunted off to the rest of Alphabet where Larry & Sergey have a more direct role in shepherding it. I think all 3 CEOs were strong in their own way, but the CEO transition made me appreciate how oftentimes a leader's biggest strengths are often also their biggest weaknesses. Larry is insane, for instance; IMHO he's insane in a good way, because we outright wouldn't have Google otherwise, but that same oddness of perception made him a maddening CEO to work under. Similarly, Eric was a great peacemaker and good at quickly making decisions that pleased as many people as possible, but that same ability to compromise made him a poor innovator and unlikely to have the moral courage to bet the company on crazy ideas. It also convinced me that Paul Graham's thesis, that big companies are constitutionally incapable of innovating, was correct. The reason is precisely that duality above; in order to innovate, you need someone whose personality is insane, but who then has to directly butt up against reality, and experience that resistance first-hand. It doesn't work for someone insane to direct lots of not-insane employees who get paid to build the product, because the type of creative insights that come from facing contradiction directly can't survive outside of a single mind. The innovator has to do the work directly.
    - amyjess 9y ago
      Thank you!
    - DonHopkins 9y ago
      The old expression "all our wood behind one arrow" was actually "one of President and CEO Scott McNealy's favorite quotes", which Sun used as a marketing campaign slogan and in presskits around 1990. https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/25years/sunpranks.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.co... Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had all of Sun's wood behind it whooshed through the air and hit the bull's eye of a target. (Nobody at Sun ever knew what the target was, but by golly they all knew which arrow to put their wood behind.) Photo of Scott McNealy in his office at Sun with a huge Cupid's Span style wooden arrow through his window, and a small Steve Martin style wooden arrow through his head: https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-arrow https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-ar... Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991 Associated Press (Google News Archive) Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.
- linkregister 9y ago
  Isn't the change in perks due to Ruth's arrival as CFO?
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    Yeah, but Ruth wouldn't arrive as CFO unless the CEO determined that that was what the company needed. The perks & engineering freedom aspect of the transition was underway during Larry's tenure as CEO; Sundar just institutionalized it.
- dnr 9y ago
  I don't think it took that long at all. I left Google in late 2011 and things already felt noticeably different. Not so much affecting my day to day work, but in what and how people talked about, and general culture/morale. When Larry took over, my thoughts were initially "eh, this isn't going to make any difference to me," and by the end of the year were more "huh, I guess I didn't realize all the ways a CEO affects a company."

nostrademons 9y ago

Culture always changes when the CEO is replaced. The culture of Google changed noticeably when Eric Schmidt stepped aside for Larry Page, and I've heard it's changed again now that Sundar is CEO (ironically, it seems closer to the Schmidt era now, but without the perks & engineering freedom). The culture of YCombinator changed when Paul Graham stepped aside for Sam Altman. It does take a couple years to take hold though. I remember that when Larry took over Google in 2011, it was largely business as usual at first, but there was a noticeable shift by the time I left in 2014.

amyjess 9y ago
Can you go into detail about how the culture changed? I'm curious.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  From Eric -> Larry: - "More wood behind fewer arrows". This was actually a Steve Jobs principle that Larry adopted: kill off all your insignificant products to focus on just a few key areas. - More willingness to take on moonshots; less tolerance for projects that might be good for a small segment of the userbase, but don't appreciably move the needle. - Seemingly less collegial atmosphere. Eric tolerated a lot of "You'll do your thing, I'll do mine, and it's okay if Google has half a dozen products that all do slight variations of each other." Larry insisted on more product discipline, but that often meant more of a scarcity mentality among execs, which led to more turf wars and infighting. - More top-down culture. Eric had few opinions on what Google should be doing, he just wanted to make sure we were doing it well. Larry had very definite opinions on what Google should be doing, and if you didn't share them, go start your own company. - More chaotic management style. I got the sense that Larry didn't actually know what was going on with the company, on an individual-contributor level, and so when he made decisions, they often made no sense to the rest of the company. Eric didn't know what was going on with the company either, but he was okay with that, as long as the money kept coming in and we didn't do anything illegal, so he made fewer decisions that weren't a direct reaction to an issue that was brought to him. From Larry -> Sundar. Keep in mind that I left before Sundar became CEO, so this is all second-hand: - Hierarchy and top-down culture has persisted. - Collegiality seems to have returned. Just my perception, but Google seems a nicer place to work now than when G+ was seemingly taking over the company in 2012. - Sundar is generally more informed and, well, sane, as perceived by the employees. - Sundar is a caretaker: the core areas of Google are explicitly designed not to require massive company-changing innovation, instead relying on incremental improvement to existing products that can be driven by middle-management, and all the innovation is shunted off to the rest of Alphabet where Larry & Sergey have a more direct role in shepherding it. I think all 3 CEOs were strong in their own way, but the CEO transition made me appreciate how oftentimes a leader's biggest strengths are often also their biggest weaknesses. Larry is insane, for instance; IMHO he's insane in a good way, because we outright wouldn't have Google otherwise, but that same oddness of perception made him a maddening CEO to work under. Similarly, Eric was a great peacemaker and good at quickly making decisions that pleased as many people as possible, but that same ability to compromise made him a poor innovator and unlikely to have the moral courage to bet the company on crazy ideas. It also convinced me that Paul Graham's thesis, that big companies are constitutionally incapable of innovating, was correct. The reason is precisely that duality above; in order to innovate, you need someone whose personality is insane, but who then has to directly butt up against reality, and experience that resistance first-hand. It doesn't work for someone insane to direct lots of not-insane employees who get paid to build the product, because the type of creative insights that come from facing contradiction directly can't survive outside of a single mind. The innovator has to do the work directly.
  - amyjess 9y ago
    Thank you!
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    The old expression "all our wood behind one arrow" was actually "one of President and CEO Scott McNealy's favorite quotes", which Sun used as a marketing campaign slogan and in presskits around 1990. https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/25years/sunpranks.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.co... Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had all of Sun's wood behind it whooshed through the air and hit the bull's eye of a target. (Nobody at Sun ever knew what the target was, but by golly they all knew which arrow to put their wood behind.) Photo of Scott McNealy in his office at Sun with a huge Cupid's Span style wooden arrow through his window, and a small Steve Martin style wooden arrow through his head: https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-arrow https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-ar... Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991 Associated Press (Google News Archive) Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.
linkregister 9y ago
Isn't the change in perks due to Ruth's arrival as CFO?
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Yeah, but Ruth wouldn't arrive as CFO unless the CEO determined that that was what the company needed. The perks & engineering freedom aspect of the transition was underway during Larry's tenure as CEO; Sundar just institutionalized it.
dnr 9y ago
I don't think it took that long at all. I left Google in late 2011 and things already felt noticeably different. Not so much affecting my day to day work, but in what and how people talked about, and general culture/morale. When Larry took over, my thoughts were initially "eh, this isn't going to make any difference to me," and by the end of the year were more "huh, I guess I didn't realize all the ways a CEO affects a company."