Is there a cause-effect relationship between resources and innovation?
Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer at Google, says Larry Page certainly believes so. I asked this question at the Citi Technology Investor Conference 2012 at Hilton, New York, and he responded to me elaborately. The specific question is at : in the webcast here at 35:20.
In academia, an article from Scott Anthony of Harvard Business Review is presented here with three steps on how to innovate in tough times. The three points are:
Particularly interesting is the fact that Nikesh Arora (Google CBO) mentioned exactly the third point as one of the strategies being deployed at Google.
Detailed transcript of the question I asked Nikesh and his response are below:
Question from Manik Patil:
From a supply side perspective, for your engineers or your staff employees, in general, Google is now having over 50,000 employees.
How do you plan to keep the productivity high and stop/avoid complacence kick in?
We have seen history of companies in the past where they have great growth, lot of products...eventually having trouble with growing number of staff employees and eventually having some pockets of lack of productivity.
Response from Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer, Google:
It's a good question, really!
First of all, we are still getting used to the idea that we are 50,000 employees. We see ourselves at Google as Google and Motorola, which we run as a separate entity. For foreseeable future, that is how it is going to be. Dennis has done a great job with getting his arms around Motorola and has a great team.
Scarcity creates innovation
But having said that, your question is a good question because we are constantly thinking about how do we make sure that we keep efficiency and 'efficiency' not just because we think about life that way but you know Larry (Page) has a very clear point of view that scarcity creates innovation. Having abundant resources -to your point- makes people complacent. They don't think about this...they think about solving bigger problems with lots of people. So, we do and try to make sure that teams have little less resource so that they are forced to think out of the box to solve the problems with constrained resources as opposed to having abundant resources.
Large Scale
Having said that, it does take a lot of resources to keep the engine running with $10 billion in quarterly revenues and billions of searches a day around the world and products like Android, Youtube. So, it's a constant challenge.
No Silver Bullet
There is no silver bullet and one answer to it. It just requires management to be vigilant. And does require for us to keep going back to our portfolio more often than not to make sure that we are not doing things that are not good for us or are not going to scale well.
Balance necessary
At the same time, you have to be careful that if you pre-judge things to soon then you may be at the risk of killing innovation right when it is about to start. So, it's a fine balance and there is one more overhang of management.
Another leader who thinks similarly is: James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-14/can-morgan-stanley-s-gorman-save-wall-street-.html
Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer at Google, says Larry Page certainly believes so. I asked this question at the Citi Technology Investor Conference 2012 at Hilton, New York, and he responded to me elaborately. The specific question is at : in the webcast here at 35:20.
In academia, an article from Scott Anthony of Harvard Business Review is presented here with three steps on how to innovate in tough times. The three points are:
- Lower the cost of testing
- Creatively tap into outside resources
- Ruthlessly prune the portfolio
Particularly interesting is the fact that Nikesh Arora (Google CBO) mentioned exactly the third point as one of the strategies being deployed at Google.
Detailed transcript of the question I asked Nikesh and his response are below:
Question from Manik Patil:
From a supply side perspective, for your engineers or your staff employees, in general, Google is now having over 50,000 employees.
How do you plan to keep the productivity high and stop/avoid complacence kick in?
We have seen history of companies in the past where they have great growth, lot of products...eventually having trouble with growing number of staff employees and eventually having some pockets of lack of productivity.
Response from Nikesh Arora, Chief Business Officer, Google:
It's a good question, really!
First of all, we are still getting used to the idea that we are 50,000 employees. We see ourselves at Google as Google and Motorola, which we run as a separate entity.
Scarcity creates innovation
But having said that, your question is a good question because we are constantly thinking about how do we make sure that we keep efficiency and 'efficiency' not just because we think about life that way but you know Larry (Page) has a very clear point of view that scarcity creates innovation. Having abundant resources -to your point- makes people complacent. They don't think about this...they think about solving bigger problems with lots of people. So, we do and try to make sure that teams have little less resource so that they are forced to think out of the box to solve the problems with constrained resources as opposed to having abundant resources.
Large Scale
Having said that, it does take a lot of resources to keep the engine running with $10 billion in quarterly revenues and billions of searches a day around the world and products like Android, Youtube. So, it's a constant challenge.
No Silver Bullet
There is no silver bullet and one answer to it. It just requires management to be vigilant. And does require for us to keep going back to our portfolio more often than not to make sure that we are not doing things that are not good for us or are not going to scale well.
Balance necessary
At the same time, you have to be careful that if you pre-judge things to soon then you may be at the risk of killing innovation right when it is about to start. So, it's a fine balance and there is one more overhang of management.
Another leader who thinks similarly is: James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-14/can-morgan-stanley-s-gorman-save-wall-street-.html
I had certainly observed this at several highly innovative clients I had the privilege to work with.
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