The Maze Is in the Mouse

Set aside the peacetime generals who underpromise and underdeliver. Define ambitious causes that you will collectively fight for. Expect and reward individual sacrifice towards those causes. Such battle requires heroes whom you should enable and reward. The best people want to make a difference. Motivated people are capable of immense and uniquely

Overall, it is a soft peacetime culture where nothing is worth fighting for. The people who are inclined to fight on behalf of customers or new ideas or creativity soon learn the downside of doing so. By definition, there is a disincentive to go above and beyond

Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevit

Lead with commitment to a mission. It has to go beyond technology (eg: using AI) or making money (eg: Google cloud revenue). It has to be about making positive change in the world, for real people (users, customers) in the real world. Googlers are idealists at heart and their work needs to mean something. They also need to believe that their execu

The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.

(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.