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It's kind of astounding just how absolutely useless top-level communications are in publicly traded companies. My company is far smaller and less important than

It's kind of astounding just how absolutely useless top-level communications are in publicly traded companies. My company is far smaller and less important than Google, but I can still recognize the exact same brand of vacuous crap being passed off as leadership. How is it that as a people we've come to just accept this as table stakes? Those 7 goals that he gave the company are... nothing. It's so painfully inclusive that there's nothing left to not be a goal. "Build the most helpful personal computing platforms and devices"? What the fuck is that? What activity could possibly be ruled as conclusively in or out of conformance with that goal? It reminds me of the brain-dead training modules the whole world is required to click-through as fast as possible. Everybody knows it's pointless, nobody complains. I'm left wondering who the hell is driving all of this corporate theater? What is this reality distortion field that makes us feel like it is an inevitable fact of life that these leaders can only communicate in banal, unactionable platitudes? How is it that the entire corporate world has agreed that the liability of slipping up or saying something too opinionated outweighs _actually communicating_ with the damn employees?

MyFedora 3y ago
I don't get what's so hard to understand here. Vision and mission statements are sanity checks for employees to see whether they help move the company towards or away from the desired direction. For example, if a company aims to develop and deliver affordable and innovative healthcare solutions that enhance the well-being of individuals worldwide, an employee may realize that whatever they're working is too expensive and therefore inaccessible to many people around the globe. You may correctly point out that a concrete goal for how much a given solution can cost is preferable, but the statements cover that as well: Management derives operational goals from these statements. Since healthcare solutions must be affordable, management can commission research on what the average person can afford in a given field, and use that research to inform how much a solution can cost. Values dictate the morale boundaries: Sure, our goal is to to develop and deliver affordable and innovative healthcare solutions that enhance the well-being of individuals worldwide, but don't use child labor to achieve that.
paulddraper 3y ago
> It's so painfully inclusive that there's nothing left to not be a goal. To be fair... it's Google. There's nothing computing-related that isn't Google. ISP, cloud, web, personal hardware, IT security, OS, autonomous vehicles, social media, thermostats, mapping...
- posguy 3y ago
  There is plenty of computing related stuff that Google doesn't do, has stopped doing or outsources nearly all of, whether it be ceasing to be a Domain Registrar, providing voice & texting services (Google Voice being just another Bandwidth.com frontend, Google Fi being an alternative onramp to the T-Mobile network, with identical roaming). You mentioned social media, what social media happens on Google's platforms? Google Wave is long dead, Google Talk was broken so badly everyone I know stopped using it. Google Groups is a wasteland that just spams up Usenet, so everyone ignores it. Where is Google in action when it comes to social media?
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > what social media happens on Google's platforms? youtube/youtube shorts have a lot "social media" going on
    - spartanatreyu 3y ago
      Youtube is currently full of attention-bait, rage-bait, spam, scams, and AI noise. It takes work over months of time to find youtube channels with value and a few more months to vet their worth. While it IS a social media network, the majority of user content on the website is low-value spam comments.
      - riku_iki 3y ago
        > Youtube is currently full of attention-bait, rage-bait, spam, scams, and AI noise. there is a chance youtube ML gives you recommendations based on your interests.. I find a lot of good quality content on youtube.
riku_iki 3y ago
what kind of goals would you set if you be Pichai?
- shmerl 3y ago
  Deploy Google Fiber everywhere?
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    I think this is something with low reward/risk ratio for google, given where they have moat and expertise.
    - ukuina 3y ago
      This is high risk, actually. Google has peering agreements with all major ISPs... the same ones that dislike the existence of cheap, fast fiber.
- operatingthetan 3y ago
  Make the public trust Google more than any other FAANG again. People like Microsoft more than any of those companies now, which is a hilarious flip from how people felt about them in the late 90s early 2000s.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    HN crowd may be not trusting google, but I am not so sure about general public. You probably don't have any hard data in your hands.
    - operatingthetan 3y ago
      >You probably don't have any hard data in your hands. Okay? I bet you don't either.
      - 3y ago
code_biologist 3y ago
I'm left wondering who the hell is driving all of this corporate theater? What is this reality distortion field that makes us feel like it is an inevitable fact of life that these leaders can only communicate in banal, unactionable platitudes? At risk of shilling a bit, Whatifalthist posted an interesting video today "Understanding Modern Civilization" [1]. It's a longer critique of modernity, but I particularly liked the discussion of why the managerial elite came to power. In modernity, the lack of life or death pressure, social mobility, plus the gameability of metrics / systems used to determine who has power (ie. ivy league and big 4 consultancy pedigree vs inherited power back in the day) has made our leadership subject to the same foibles that affected Chinese mandarins historically: corruption and a focus on appearances over the details of actual execution. So yeah, Sundar is one of our modern mandarins. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SjMVJrmhh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SjMVJrmhh8
- esperent 3y ago
  Interesting take, I'll watch the video later. One important note is that there's a big difference between our culture and historical Chinese culture - and basically all powerful cultures that have existed before now. That is, the flexibility and rapid change of the system itself. It's not just upward mobility of people, it's upward mobility of companies and rapid systemic change, driven by technology and cultural shifts. Think about the difference between our society, and the 80s, the 50s, the 30s. There's never been a period like this before, so making comparisons to previous cultures is of limited utility and that needs to be noted when making the comparisons. We might think of Google as a never-ending behemoth with incredible power because in our recent lifetimes it's been that way. But the reality is that the company has only existed for ~26 years and if it truly slips up it could be a shadow of itself in another five years. Something else would jump into the power vacuum and our society would barely blink, except for a million articles with titles like "What happened to Google?" being written.
  - sifar 3y ago
    I believe bureaucratic structures at scale are the same irrespective of cultures.
xyst 3y ago
The current ceo is cut from the same cloth of generic Wall Street b-school flunkies. What do you expect? Their pay is often determined based on the performance of the stonk. An easy way to pump their $$$ and meet whatever OKRs are required to satisfy bonuses, is to layoff staff. Use vague excuses (ie, blaming remote work) for poor performance. Rinse and repeat as needed every quarter until they can sustainably compete or until they are 86’d.
Gibbon1 3y ago
> but I can still recognize the exact same brand of vacuous crap being passed off as leadership I googled a bit and found he has an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. So that's probably the answer.
neilv 3y ago
I agree with your general idea. This particular example looks mixed to me. > 1. Deliver the world's most advanced, safe, and responsible AI. For a company with Google's resources, this could be a good mission. > 2. Improve knowledge, learning, creativity, and productivity. What? > 3. Build the most helpful personal computing platforms and devices. This could be a good mission, or a disposable platitude. > 4. Enable organizations and developers to innovate on Google Cloud. If they want to keep a cloud business, I guess they have to mention it in the goals, though this one sounds like they haven't given it any thought, and just cribbed some disposable copy out of sales materials at the last minute. Maybe it's alluding to some innovation-enabling AI technology push (like focusing on meeting the demand for some kinds of AI compute capacity, through proprietary hardware and software)? Why not say that? > 5. Provide the world's most trusted products and platforms. If they wanted to make this a cornerstone, I'd say they have to be more specific. Does it mean making things work better? Respecting people's privacy and security in some way other than what they currently say they do? Start focusing on products and services in which canceling isn't an option, so people can depend on them? > 6. Build a Google that's extraordinary for Googlers and the world. Needs elaboration for what this means, and how they're going to do it. > 7. Improve company velocity, efficiency, and productivity, and deliver durable cost savings. They sure to have a lot of goals that would be tricky to solve for simultaneously, if these were all real top-level-ish goals. More interesting would be if they said (off-the-cuff) "Our sole top-level goal is to deliver the world's most advanced, safe, and responsible AI. We actually really, really mean it. To that end, adtech is now a subgoal in support of short-term funding the AI goal, adtech will disappear in 4-8 years, and until then will be staffed at minimal sustaining level. Information services and devices are solely to provide data and user access points for the AI work. Cloud services are refocused on AI-based solutions. We don't need 70% of our current employees, and we need to replace some of that freed headcount with different kinds of thinking. And we need to get the remaining and new people to be motivated by the mission, despite 20 years of hiring and incentives that would naturally lead most to focus on career rather than mission." Probably neither they nor any other huge company could pull off a serious goal focus like that, and they'd basically throw away a cash cow machine that could've been milked much longer. But it would still be interesting. It's really an exercise in what it might mean to take stated corporate goals very, very seriously, rather than the default, which is a behemoth lumbering on pretty much as before, while some costs get cut, and people spin their metrics and reports a little differently. Or try "Our sole top-level goal is to maintain adtech dominance and revenue, through..." That's not as big a mission change, and maybe you can get by with just nudging huge hierarchies of career-directed people with broad platitudes and KPIs&OKRs.
GrooveSAN 3y ago
I don’t think those company goals should be looked at face value. What is interesting to watch is the dynamics (what was there last year and isn’t there anymore), read between the lines (what is not mentioned as a goal) and the ordering (what is left at the end, what is more important than what). You can’t expect such an exercise to be treated with transparency (#5. Lay off 20% more of those guys) as there’s just too much to lose by doing so. On the other hand, those goals are subtle but clear enough for the top managers of the company to inspire themselves and define their own - more concrete - yearly ambitions. And the lower you go in the org, the more concrete the goals (assuming there are any at all). No yearly goal is worse to me than unclear ones, as it gives red flags of management not giving a shit and cruising.
tim333 3y ago
>Those 7 goals that he gave the company are... nothing Goal one is something - world's most advanced AI. There's an actual competition there with OpenAI which seems ahead a little. The rest, yeah... it's all let's keep doing what we were doing.

MyFedora 3y ago

I don't get what's so hard to understand here. Vision and mission statements are sanity checks for employees to see whether they help move the company towards or away from the desired direction. For example, if a company aims to develop and deliver affordable and innovative healthcare solutions that enhance the well-being of individuals worldwide, an employee may realize that whatever they're working is too expensive and therefore inaccessible to many people around the globe. You may correctly point out that a concrete goal for how much a given solution can cost is preferable, but the statements cover that as well: Management derives operational goals from these statements. Since healthcare solutions must be affordable, management can commission research on what the average person can afford in a given field, and use that research to inform how much a solution can cost. Values dictate the morale boundaries: Sure, our goal is to to develop and deliver affordable and innovative healthcare solutions that enhance the well-being of individuals worldwide, but don't use child labor to achieve that.

paulddraper 3y ago

> It's so painfully inclusive that there's nothing left to not be a goal. To be fair... it's Google. There's nothing computing-related that isn't Google. ISP, cloud, web, personal hardware, IT security, OS, autonomous vehicles, social media, thermostats, mapping...

posguy 3y ago
There is plenty of computing related stuff that Google doesn't do, has stopped doing or outsources nearly all of, whether it be ceasing to be a Domain Registrar, providing voice & texting services (Google Voice being just another Bandwidth.com frontend, Google Fi being an alternative onramp to the T-Mobile network, with identical roaming). You mentioned social media, what social media happens on Google's platforms? Google Wave is long dead, Google Talk was broken so badly everyone I know stopped using it. Google Groups is a wasteland that just spams up Usenet, so everyone ignores it. Where is Google in action when it comes to social media?
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > what social media happens on Google's platforms? youtube/youtube shorts have a lot "social media" going on
  - spartanatreyu 3y ago
    Youtube is currently full of attention-bait, rage-bait, spam, scams, and AI noise. It takes work over months of time to find youtube channels with value and a few more months to vet their worth. While it IS a social media network, the majority of user content on the website is low-value spam comments.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      > Youtube is currently full of attention-bait, rage-bait, spam, scams, and AI noise. there is a chance youtube ML gives you recommendations based on your interests.. I find a lot of good quality content on youtube.

riku_iki 3y ago

what kind of goals would you set if you be Pichai?

shmerl 3y ago
Deploy Google Fiber everywhere?
- riku_iki 3y ago
  I think this is something with low reward/risk ratio for google, given where they have moat and expertise.
  - ukuina 3y ago
    This is high risk, actually. Google has peering agreements with all major ISPs... the same ones that dislike the existence of cheap, fast fiber.
operatingthetan 3y ago
Make the public trust Google more than any other FAANG again. People like Microsoft more than any of those companies now, which is a hilarious flip from how people felt about them in the late 90s early 2000s.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  HN crowd may be not trusting google, but I am not so sure about general public. You probably don't have any hard data in your hands.
  - operatingthetan 3y ago
    >You probably don't have any hard data in your hands. Okay? I bet you don't either.
    - 3y ago

code_biologist 3y ago

I'm left wondering who the hell is driving all of this corporate theater? What is this reality distortion field that makes us feel like it is an inevitable fact of life that these leaders can only communicate in banal, unactionable platitudes? At risk of shilling a bit, Whatifalthist posted an interesting video today "Understanding Modern Civilization" [1]. It's a longer critique of modernity, but I particularly liked the discussion of why the managerial elite came to power. In modernity, the lack of life or death pressure, social mobility, plus the gameability of metrics / systems used to determine who has power (ie. ivy league and big 4 consultancy pedigree vs inherited power back in the day) has made our leadership subject to the same foibles that affected Chinese mandarins historically: corruption and a focus on appearances over the details of actual execution. So yeah, Sundar is one of our modern mandarins. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SjMVJrmhh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SjMVJrmhh8

esperent 3y ago
Interesting take, I'll watch the video later. One important note is that there's a big difference between our culture and historical Chinese culture - and basically all powerful cultures that have existed before now. That is, the flexibility and rapid change of the system itself. It's not just upward mobility of people, it's upward mobility of companies and rapid systemic change, driven by technology and cultural shifts. Think about the difference between our society, and the 80s, the 50s, the 30s. There's never been a period like this before, so making comparisons to previous cultures is of limited utility and that needs to be noted when making the comparisons. We might think of Google as a never-ending behemoth with incredible power because in our recent lifetimes it's been that way. But the reality is that the company has only existed for ~26 years and if it truly slips up it could be a shadow of itself in another five years. Something else would jump into the power vacuum and our society would barely blink, except for a million articles with titles like "What happened to Google?" being written.
- sifar 3y ago
  I believe bureaucratic structures at scale are the same irrespective of cultures.

xyst 3y ago

The current ceo is cut from the same cloth of generic Wall Street b-school flunkies. What do you expect? Their pay is often determined based on the performance of the stonk. An easy way to pump their $$$ and meet whatever OKRs are required to satisfy bonuses, is to layoff staff. Use vague excuses (ie, blaming remote work) for poor performance. Rinse and repeat as needed every quarter until they can sustainably compete or until they are 86’d.

Gibbon1 3y ago

> but I can still recognize the exact same brand of vacuous crap being passed off as leadership I googled a bit and found he has an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. So that's probably the answer.

neilv 3y ago

I agree with your general idea. This particular example looks mixed to me. > 1. Deliver the world's most advanced, safe, and responsible AI. For a company with Google's resources, this could be a good mission. > 2. Improve knowledge, learning, creativity, and productivity. What? > 3. Build the most helpful personal computing platforms and devices. This could be a good mission, or a disposable platitude. > 4. Enable organizations and developers to innovate on Google Cloud. If they want to keep a cloud business, I guess they have to mention it in the goals, though this one sounds like they haven't given it any thought, and just cribbed some disposable copy out of sales materials at the last minute. Maybe it's alluding to some innovation-enabling AI technology push (like focusing on meeting the demand for some kinds of AI compute capacity, through proprietary hardware and software)? Why not say that? > 5. Provide the world's most trusted products and platforms. If they wanted to make this a cornerstone, I'd say they have to be more specific. Does it mean making things work better? Respecting people's privacy and security in some way other than what they currently say they do? Start focusing on products and services in which canceling isn't an option, so people can depend on them? > 6. Build a Google that's extraordinary for Googlers and the world. Needs elaboration for what this means, and how they're going to do it. > 7. Improve company velocity, efficiency, and productivity, and deliver durable cost savings. They sure to have a lot of goals that would be tricky to solve for simultaneously, if these were all real top-level-ish goals. More interesting would be if they said (off-the-cuff) "Our sole top-level goal is to deliver the world's most advanced, safe, and responsible AI. We actually really, really mean it. To that end, adtech is now a subgoal in support of short-term funding the AI goal, adtech will disappear in 4-8 years, and until then will be staffed at minimal sustaining level. Information services and devices are solely to provide data and user access points for the AI work. Cloud services are refocused on AI-based solutions. We don't need 70% of our current employees, and we need to replace some of that freed headcount with different kinds of thinking. And we need to get the remaining and new people to be motivated by the mission, despite 20 years of hiring and incentives that would naturally lead most to focus on career rather than mission." Probably neither they nor any other huge company could pull off a serious goal focus like that, and they'd basically throw away a cash cow machine that could've been milked much longer. But it would still be interesting. It's really an exercise in what it might mean to take stated corporate goals very, very seriously, rather than the default, which is a behemoth lumbering on pretty much as before, while some costs get cut, and people spin their metrics and reports a little differently. Or try "Our sole top-level goal is to maintain adtech dominance and revenue, through..." That's not as big a mission change, and maybe you can get by with just nudging huge hierarchies of career-directed people with broad platitudes and KPIs&OKRs.

GrooveSAN 3y ago

I don’t think those company goals should be looked at face value. What is interesting to watch is the dynamics (what was there last year and isn’t there anymore), read between the lines (what is not mentioned as a goal) and the ordering (what is left at the end, what is more important than what). You can’t expect such an exercise to be treated with transparency (#5. Lay off 20% more of those guys) as there’s just too much to lose by doing so. On the other hand, those goals are subtle but clear enough for the top managers of the company to inspire themselves and define their own - more concrete - yearly ambitions. And the lower you go in the org, the more concrete the goals (assuming there are any at all). No yearly goal is worse to me than unclear ones, as it gives red flags of management not giving a shit and cruising.

tim333 3y ago

>Those 7 goals that he gave the company are... nothing Goal one is something - world's most advanced AI. There's an actual competition there with OpenAI which seems ahead a little. The rest, yeah... it's all let's keep doing what we were doing.