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It seems like stagnation eventually catches up to every company. Google got big on rapid innovation and emphasis on engineering, but by long observation we can
by brobdingnagians 8y ago
It seems like stagnation eventually catches up to every company. Google got big on rapid innovation and emphasis on engineering, but by long observation we can see it becomes more and more difficult to do that in a large company, and todays heros on innovation seem to be tomorrows megacorps waiting for the upstarts to overtake them when some large event changes the market. Maybe it's a mix of pride, complaceny, internal politics, and large-corp culture.
- hinkley 8y agoThere’s a pattern in business of changing CEOs during different phases of the company lifecycle. They have CEOs for growth, ones for mergers, ones for IPOs and ones for selling out. When a company is growing if you let yourself get pulled in too many directions you’ll suffocate. But maybe the message becomes “we concentrate on a few important things” and eventually those things become boring. You need a new message before you become stodgy. There’s also JWZ’s dotcom era theory about people wanting to make a company successful vs people who want to be at a successful company.
- brobdingnagians 8y agoI hadn't seen this before [ https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html ], but I really like it, thank you for quoting it! Posting here in case anyone else benefits.
- hinkley 8y agoJust a warning to anyone who didn't already click: JWZ has a beef with Hacker News, and redirects to borderline NSFW image on Imgur. Cut and paste if you want to read it.