It's always a bad sign to me when a company's strategy lurches based on who's around rather than on changing external circumstances. It suggests to me that the strategy isn't a coherent, collectively understood plan, but a political balance.
I think it's a stronger phenomenon in cutting edge areas, as there's less group-think to fall back on or use as a crutch.
Everyone knew what to do with a typewriter, even if the visionary leader left. If the person who was saying that microcomputers were going to be the next big thing quit? Nobody else has that idea in their heads.
Is this from a real-world example? Because I'd expect the opposite to be true.
Cutting-edge areas tend to attract people there for the vision. And the harsh commercial realities of innovative markets mean companies get in trouble if they get complacent. Whereas people in larger, older companies in stable markets can let their vision die and just go on doing whatever worked before. At least until it doesn't work, and then they're screwed.
In this instance, Google is a larger, older company.
Or to extend the analogy, if someone goes to IBM as director for New Technology X, and then leaves five years later, what's the likelihood people in New Technology X Division are going to be able take his or her responsibilities over?
Big companies are big companies and they usually don't encourage or reward employees overly much for striking out in a brave new direction. Which is hilarious given that they'll continously try and hire exactly those people externally.
Though I suppose you honestly can't encourage too much rebellion when you make your money from a crank being turned (and happen to need 1,000 bodies to just shut up, turn the crank, and get paid).
I think it's the common mode in American business culture the last few decades, but I think that's a result of the managerialist paradigm that has come to dominate.
Most startups avoid it to begin with. There's a really strong incentive for having a clear mission and high customer focus; many things get easier. Wikipedia has done a good job with "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." Toyota has done a fantastic job organizing around the Toyota Production System. The best restaurants, bakeries, and the like generally have strong shared understandings. The same is often true of multi-generational family firms.
I think even Google did a good job for a long time rallying around "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful". Which makes this especially sad to me. Around the time of Google Plus and "more wood behind fewer arrows" I think there was a culture shift that is probably irreversible.
>> I think it's the common mode in American business culture the last few decades
Agreed. I find it doesn't hold for most contemporary Japanese corporations though. Their leaders tend to be switchable placeholders whose main purpose is to efficiently represent a consensus view.
Interestingly, though they do have momentum, they seem to lack strategic direction. Perhaps only charismatic leaders can provide the latter. Japan can produce such people (e.g. Morita at Sony) but the current environment values continuity over vision.
Very interesting. I suspect that Toyota is a similar result of a visionary leader. I want to believe there's some way to get the benefits of both approaches at scale, but I have yet to see an example.
Do you have anything you'd suggest I read to get a better understanding of the current Japanese situation? Most of my knowledge is about historic Toyota, which I'm sure gives me a distorted view.
Sorry, my opinion is formed only by observation and discussion with related parties. I don't have any direct experience of Toyota, except with one of their trading company's subsidiaries. Uniquely, this company does have a visionary leader at the helm, yet I believe there is no correlation with the parent's leadership style because Toyota Tsucho is run at arms length.
My rather uninformed opinion of Toyota Motors is that they are succeeding exactly as other Japanese companies used to succeed. If this is right, and I hope not, then they may be fated to see the same stagnation in time. A more optimistic view is that Toyota have something unique. If so, I don't believe it to be charismatic leadership. It would be baked into their culture.
Of note is Toyota's recent decision to invest $1B in AI research in Silicon Valley and Boston. They are trying to get ahead of the coming tech for autonomous driving and factory automation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/technology/toyota-silicon-...
Thanks! Yes, I'll be interested to see how Toyota goes. Although many people have taken the TPS lessons and applied them in software, Toyota itself is not one of those companies. (Indeed, their software appears to be terrible. [1]) That makes me think that the visionary leadership that created TPS is long gone, and that they are coasting. But yes, what they're coasting on has a continuous improvement component, so it could be that an advantage is a permanent part of the culture.
It is often true, but not always true. I have worked at or worked with companies that could express their strategy. But usually they are not big multi-division companies like Alphabet.
Yeah, but we're talking about shaping the future here: If you're relying on external circumstances for your hints as to what to do next, you're just reacting to the present....
