Interesting Snippets

In industries in which products don’t change much—paint, bricks, chemicals—professional CEOs thrive. Companies in these industries don’t rise and fall on innovation—they depend on optimization. (Think Coke, which has been selling the same core product for 126 years.) The tech industry works differently. “The nature of technology,” Marc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder who is one of Andreesen Horowitz’s chief partners, said at a conference recently, “is that the product is always changing. It’s just so rare that you’ll have the same product in five years.” …

“If you put a sales guy in charge of the company,” Andreessen continued, “they’ll optimize for the next quarter. Finance guys will optimize the financials.” The company’s founder will optimize the products—and will often have the vision necessary to drive the company’s future innovation. As for the nuts-and-bolts skills necessary to lead a company, those can be learned.

One consequence of this data-driven revolution is that the whole attitude toward writing software, or even imagining it, becomes subtly constrained… A number of developers told me that A/B has probably reduced the number of big, dramatic changes to their products. They now think of wholesale revisions as simply too risky—instead, they want to break every idea up into smaller pieces, with each piece tested and then gradually, tentatively phased into the traffic. But this approach, and the mindset that comes with it, has its own dangers. Companies may protect themselves against major gaffes but risk a kind of plodding incrementalism. They may find themselves chasing “local maxima”—places where the A/B tests might create the best possible outcome within narrow constraints—instead of pursuing real breakthroughs… “If you rely too much on the data, you never branch out. You just keep making better buggy whips.

more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500 now have Yammer networks. This includes 4 of the largest U.S. companies, 3 of the top 10 global companies in the fields of construction, oil and gas, pharmaceutical and beverage, and 2 of the top 5 Internet retailers worldwide

Zuckerberg didn’t just wait. He obsessively learned what being a CEO was about. He surrounded himself by people who had strengths he didn’t and absorbed from them like a sponge. Unlike nearly every other Internet wunderkind who came before him, he didn’t hire the grown-up to run the company. He became the grown-up to run the company.

There are a lot of reasons Larry Page envies Mark Zuckerberg these days. But the pre-IPO Page would most definitely envy his ability to hold onto the reins, experience and age be damned.

Since 2006, I’ve argued that Facebook is not the prototypical Web 2.0 company: It’s an outlier. It’s one of those companies that comes along every decade or so and does more than just create wealth and jobs and a product we can’t live without. It changes the very nature of what it means to be a startup. It innovates not only on whatever product it is taking to market– it innovates the idea of what a startup is.

There’ve been several of these throughout Valley history: Shockley Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor, HP, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Oracle, Netscape, eBay, Cisco, Google are some of the major ones. Each has in its own way changed the game.

Companies need to start strengthening their digital assets:
— Information and analytics about customers, suppliers, employees, and competitors
— Connectivity and feedback loops that lubricate the digital enterprise
— Intellectual property that bestows a competitive digital advantage
— The people, culture, and capabilities needed to execute and deliver

In the early days of electricity, companies would have had a head of electricity because it was new, scary and might kill you. Now companies have a head of Internet or head of digital because it’s new and scary.
“We’re at a point of inflection from the Internet being a specialised thing to being, like electricity, something you have to do to do your job better

The security of the 40-year career of the man in the gray-flannel suit may have been overstated, but at least he had a path, a ladder. The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort (see “The Four-Year Career”), with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you’ll stay in a single industry. It can be daunting. It can be exhausting. It can also be exhilarating.

To make sure our key decision-makers could work and make decisions in an environment more reminiscent of a start-up, we created a ‘bullpen’ in one of the buildings on our main campus, which was specially designed as a place for members of our executive team to work and talk in an informal setting. These execs now set aside a number of hours per week to be there. It’s amazing how fast things can get done – even in a large company – when you put so many key people together and don’t give them an agenda.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people,” Mr. Bezos told reporter Steve Levy last month in an interview in Wired. “But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn.

Part of the job of responsible corporate management in the 21st century is doing human rights due diligence on new markets, instituting internal review procedures, identifying principles by which decisions are to be made in tough situations, because we cannot let the short-term gains that all of us think are legitimate and worth seeking jeopardize the openness of the internet and human rights of individuals who use it without it coming back to haunt us all in the future. Because a free and open internet is important not just to technology companies but to all companies.

The phrases he used were “deep collaboration” and “concurrent engineering.” Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. “Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative,” Jobs said.

You get things such as departmental heads using their own OS to set up a cloud-based system that IT don’t know is there,” says Corbett. “There will be issues, or they’ll ask to get it supported, and IT will say, ‘hold on, we don’t even know about this, we haven’t got the budget to support this’. The boss says ‘I’m not waiting years for IT to tell me what to do. I’m going to use the stapler and envelope budget to buy something else’.