Ken Auletta - Googled - The End of the World as We Know It

Microsoft’s engineering culture, like Google‘s, had missed the warning signals that its actions had aroused the government bear. And Microsoft, like Google, truly believed it was advancing the public good. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was, after all, given away for free. A single dominant operating system meant that PCs could more easily communicate with one another, as Microsoft liked to say. Both companies were capable of being blinded by righteousness-the flip side of hubris. Unlike Microsoft, Google was managed more chaotically.

The smart question asked of Google was the one Adam Lashinsky of Fortune posed in early 2007: “Is Google’s culture great because its stock is doing well, or is its stock doing well because its culture is great?”

WHAT WASN’T AT QUESTION was Google’s success. Measuring it by growth, profits, and market valuation, it’s difficult to claim that Google’s management has not worked. And a reason it has worked, so far at least, is that it is, in the words of Google director Ram Shriram, “controlled chaos-meaning that there is some method to the madness. If you have too much structure, you have less innovation.” Instead of describing Google management as chaotic, Brin said, “I’d prefer ‘less structured.”’ He cited Google’s youth as a partial explanation: “We’re only in this business ten years.”

Former vice president Al Gore recounted a private conversation he had with Brin and Page several years ago in the boardroom near their office. Gore worried aloud whether Google was maintaining its focus on potential new search threats and continuing to prosecute its technological lead in search. “They had to go to another meeting,” Gore recalled, “and said, ‘If you can stay, Al, we’d like to bring in the engineers and scientists in charge of this part of the business.’ Ten of them came into the boardroom. Larry and Sergey left. I spent another three hours. And then when it was over, I gave Larry and Sergey an oral report.”

Four weeks later, Gore said, laughing, “I went up to their office and found that all ten of these people had been moved in. All ten of them!” He described how Page and Brin had to cram twelve computer monitors into the glassed two-story office, and “move around some of their toys-a remote control helicopter, flying messenger boards, whatever the latest new supercool toy is.” These ten people stayed-“until they satisfied themselves that they had an ongoing system for maintaining hypervigilance in the organization on the continuing innovation necessary to make sure they were always at the cutting edge of the highest quality search experience available on the Internet… I defy you to think of any other executives in the world who would have a team like that into their personal office for weeks on end.”

Gore may have been a prod, but the execution of innovation at Google is due to the focused passion Brin and Page bring to Google. Barry Diller, who had that unsettling session with Page and Brin in the early days of Google, when Page would not look up from his PDA to talk to him, now thinks what might be construed as rudeness was really focus. “They had their own method of communicating and processing,” Diller said. “They give much less quarter than other people do to common business courtesies. They’ve stayed true to this. It’s a spectacular strength. It means you never get defocused by the crowd.” At Google the focus is on the engineer is king culture Brin and Page had the precocity to impose.

True to its open-sourced, wisdom-of-the-crowd ideals, Google has created a networked management. It is bottom-up as well as top-down management, and it unleashes ideas and effort. “There is a pattern in companies,” Page explained, “even in technological companies, that the people who do the work-the engineers, the programmers, the foot soldiers, if you will-typically get rolled over by the management. Typically, the management isn’t very technical. I think that’s a very bad thing. If you’re a programmer or an engineer or computer scientist and you have someone tell you what to do who is really not very good at what you do, they tell you the wrong things. And you sort of end up building the wrong things; you end up kind of demoralized. You want to have a culture where the people who are doing the work, the scientists and the engineers, are empowered. And that they are managed by people who deeply understand what they are doing. That’s not typically the case.”

(2008)

On a sunny July afternoon in Sun Valley, three friends who had competed and cooperated for a quarter century-Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney; Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS; and Peter Chernin, the COO of News Corporation-gathered for sodas. They sat beside a tranquil pond, but their world was not serene. By the summer of 2008, the economy had started its swoon. The shrinking of the audience for their broadcast networks and TV stations had accelerated. Their stock prices were getting mauled. “At least we’ve had a good run,” Chernin said, half joking.

“Yeah,” Iger replied with a laugh, “but I feel like we’ve gotten to the orgy and all the women have left!”

“We sound like three old men sitting in Miami Beach with blankets over our legs!” Moonves cracked.

The network and station business was once much easier. “The era when I worked at ABC was fantastic,” recalled Michael Eisner, who was a program executive at the network before leaving to become CEO of Disney in the early eighties. “There were three networks, and all I had to worry about was ‘Did we have a good show?’ Even if we had a bad show, we did OK.”

What does it feel like to be a media executive navigating these swiftly churning waters? Before he became CEO of Sony, Sir Howard Stringer spent much of his life in traditional media, starting as a researcher for CBS News and becoming an award-winning news producer, president of CBS News, and president of CBS Broadcasting. Today, seated in the Sony dining room in New York, he said, “If you read every piece in every newspaper and magazine about new technology, you would walk into the East River! There are so many options out there, simultaneously, that it’s a dizzying experience. For every time you see an opportunity, you also see a threat. Every time you see a threat, you see an opportunity. Or if you see a threat, you’re afraid you’re missing an opportunity. That’s the one-two punch of the technological marathon we’re all in. You worry about missing a trend. You worry about not spotting a trend. You worry about a trend passing you by. You worry about a trend taking you into a cul-de-sac. It means that any CEO or senior executives of a company have to induce themselves to have a calm they don’t feel, in order to be rational in the face of this onslaught.”

Sony, like others, had reason to fret about missed trends. Before Stringer was CEO, the company that in 1979 had introduced the Sony Walkman was being challenged in 2001 by a stylish upstart, Apple’s iPod. By 2003 Apple’s iTunes offered singles that could be downloaded simply and for just ninety-nine cents, hampering the sale of albums by record companies like Sony. Although the Walkman was still the dominant portable music player in 2003, the iPod was gaining. I asked then CEO Nobuyuki Idei, are you worried about the iPod?

No, he replied, dismissing the question like a man brushing lint off his jacket. Sony and Dell know manufacturing. Apple does not. Within a couple of years, Apple will be out of the music business.

Probably no other traditional media business has been so disrupted by the digital wave as has music. And none was slower to respond to the challenge. Music companies like Sony gave an incentive to digital pirates by insisting that their customers buy entire albums rather than allowing them to purchase individual songs. The music companies failed to understand that technology awarded power to consumers to mix and choose their own music, failed to strike an accommodation with Napster and other music download sites, failed to create a digital jukebox like iTunes, failed to enter the lucrative concert business for their artists, failed to start a TV platform like MTV Edgar M. Bronfman, Jr., the CEO of the Warner Music Group, said, “It’s fair to say we didn’t get it”-meaning the digital revolution. “But I’m not sure what we could have done.” He added, “The record business is in trouble. The music business is not.” He believes the music companies were murdered by technological forces beyond their control. In fact, they committed suicide by neglect.