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To be clear, I think you can and should avoid a “pervasive sense of nihilism” at any organization. My quibble is with the people who think somehow Google should
by neilk 3y ago
To be clear, I think you can and should avoid a “pervasive sense of nihilism” at any organization. My quibble is with the people who think somehow Google should overcome this by finding their inner Googliness or tapping into founder magic. The solutions exist but they are hard work. They are probably more about abandoning illusions like that.
(The example of Steve Jobs might suggest that founders might have some magic after all. Maybe in this one way: he was a brutal editor and simplifier, and he was a good talent spotter. So if he had any founder magic it was _focus_, not some “spark” of indulging dreamy creativity.)
- matthewdgreen 3y agoFocus is a pretty vague term. It feels like Jobs had a talent for recognizing and promoting good product ideas and for promoting talented people to management positions. The technical leadership hierarchy at Apple also never felt extremely deep, whereas at today’s Google nobody seems to know who makes product decisions, and there’s very little unified technical direction. (Or rather, this is what I’ve heard from multiple current and former Google folks.)