Apple picker Larry Page lives up to the motto - ten times more. Many companies would be happy to improve their products by ten percent. But this is not the case with the CEO and co-founder of Google. Page says that a ten percent improvement basically means you're doing the same thing as everyone else. You probably won't have a big loss, but you won't have a big success either.
That's why Page expects its employees to create products and services that are ten times better than the competition. He is not satisfied with a few small tweaks or tweaked settings, providing only a small gain. A thousand-fold improvement requires looking at problems from a completely new angle, looking for the limits of technical possibilities and enjoying the whole creative process more.
This style of "brazen" aspiration has made Google an incredibly progressive company and set it up for success, changing the lives of its users while fattening the wallets of investors. But he also secured something much bigger, beyond Google itself - Page's approach is a beacon in the world of industry, dependent on the political scene and strategic market positioning, for those who want more from the company's management than just a bloated profit statement. Although Google has made several missteps in recent years, and its power has deservedly attracted the attention of regulators and critics alike, it remains the flagship of optimists who believe that innovation will provide us with both wonderful tools, solutions to our problems, and inspiration for our dreams. For such people—perhaps for any human enterprise in general—a car that drives itself is far more valuable than a dividend calculated in cents per share (ed. note – the driverless car is one of Google's latest technical triumphs). Nothing is more important to Larry Page.
Of course, it is difficult to work for a boss who is characterized by dissatisfaction with the pace of progress. Astro Teller, who oversees Google X, a division of blue-sky Skunkworks, illustrates Page's inclinations with a representation. Teller depicts a time machine transported from Doctor Who to Page's office. "He turns it on - and it works! Instead of being overjoyed, Page questions why it needs a plug. Wouldn't it be better if it didn't require energy at all? It's not that he's not enthusiastic or ungrateful that we built it, it's simply his characteristic, his personality, what he really is" - says Teller. There is always room for improvement and his focus and drive is where that next tenfold will be.
Page felt big even though he was small. He said he always wanted to be an inventor, not to create new things, but to change the world. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he was inspired by the school's "Leadership Training" (Leader Skills) program, called LeaderShape, with the motto: "a healthy disregard for the impossible." By the time he got to Stanford, it was a natural step for his idea of tenfold potential—a web page annotation tool.
"Putting a camel through the eye of a needle" was also the basis of Google X, which the company launched in early 2010 to identify and implement the then impossible science fiction - sacred project as the driverless car project. Another example is Google glasses, a computer as a fashion accessory. Or an artificial brain, a cluster of computers programmed with complex algorithms, capable of learning from its surroundings - similar to the human learning process. (In one experiment, involving a cluster of 1000 computers with a billion connections, it took just three days to beat previous benchmarks for identifying photos of faces and cats.)
Page was closely involved in the launch of Google X, but since his promotion to the position of CEO of the company, he has not been able to spend much time on the project. Some Googlers have wondered whether Page, whose favorite pastime is threading a camel through the eye of a needle, is sacrificing for the team by occasionally taking on some mundane tasks as CEO. (Discussing antitrust matters with bureaucrats, for example, is not his idea of time well spent.) Nevertheless, the evidence shows that he unhesitatingly applied the same "10x" rule to his role and to the company's management process. He reorganized the management team around the "L-Team" from the top positions and clearly instilled in all employees that they must try at all costs to integrate everything Google has to offer into a smoothly functioning social whole. He also made one of the boldest moves from this title - he arranged the purchase of Motorola Mobility, one of the largest manufacturers of mobile phones.
In one of the few interviews he's given as CEO, Page discussed the issue of corporate thinking and other Google issues surrounding the Mountain View, Calif., wireless network. That same day, Page turned 40 and announced a new philanthropic venture. Using Google to track flu outbreaks, he decided to pay for flu shots for children throughout the Bay Area. How generous.
Wired: Google is known for its support of its employees, when it comes to solving challenging and difficult situations and tasks, and making big bets. Why is this so important?
Larry Page: I'm afraid there's something wrong with the way we've been starting businesses. If you read news media about our company, or the tech industry in general, it will always be about competition. The stories are like from sports competitions. But it's hard now to say any examples of great things the competition has done. How exciting is it to come to work when the best you can do is berate some other company that does the same thing as you? This is the reason why many companies dissolve over time. They are used to doing exactly what they did before, with only a few changes. It's natural for people to want to work on things they know and won't fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to get old and fall behind over time. In particular, this can be said about the field of technology, which is constantly moving forward.
So my job is to help people focus on things that are not just incremental. Check out Gmail. When we announced that we were a search company - it was a leap for us to make a product that was the only one with 100x more storage. But that wouldn't happen if we were focused on small improvements.
That's a big goal, thanks for the article - J. Plzenský