blog (January, 2007)
today's private enterprise
Every modern career is heading for entrepreneurship.
The "I work at one company for the rest of my life" is gone.
In fact, you are becoming a small business, or you're becoming somewhat of an entrepreneur -- even if your elected career path is "I work for this company, and then I work for this company, and then I work for this company,..." -- because you're transferring jobs between them, and you have all the issues that a small business or entrepreneur cares about: the brand of you, what you do, that sort of thing.
The skills learned from entrepreneurship are applicable to any career path.
-- Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn,) Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture: Choosing the Entrepreneurial Path (Stanford Technology Ventures Program) [starting at 35 minutes; my minor edits]
Early in the same talk, Hoffman compares entrepreneurship to jumping off a cliff and building the airplane on the way down.
I remember my bridges and ledges; the longer I'd stand and peer over the edge, the more difficult the leap would become.
org flatness through info flow
We [at Google] have something called a project database, which is visible to all employees, which lists all the projects, and we use that to manage a lot of the remote stuff. There's also something called the snippets database where people put in what they are working on.
... a culture which requires, if you will, people to write down what they're doing and then other people get a chance to see it, even if they're not in the same place. That seems kind of obvious but it's not true in almost any organization. At other organizations they can't see what the other organization is doing, and the CEO can't see either because the management prevents communication.
So you get a flatter organization -- flatness is not a function of reporting hierarchy, it's a function of information flow.
-- Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google Inc., My [Fred Vogelstein's] other interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Wired)
it's not ROI, it's EU
(End User.)
A question posed to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, during last week's Q1 2007 earnings call, and his response:
Anthony Noto (Goldman Sachs): Eric, I was wondering if you could comment at the management level as you make investments, what measurement do you look at holistically for the company as a return-based measurement to ensure that the overall business and overall shareholders are seeing an aggregated return from each of the individual investments?
Eric Schmidt (Google): We don't approach the questions quite the same way that you phrased them. Our primary focus is on end user happiness, end user traffic, end user growth. [styling mine]
-- Google Inc. (GOOG) Q1 2007 Earnings Call (transcript or liveblogging summary)
I'd say "overall shareholders" are satisfied so far. When will user-centric become business-as-usual, again?
following dreams on sweat equity
I’m positively stunned at the blowback from business regulars about that chap giving his music away for free. Oldsters can’t understand the economics!
I’ll clue you in, THERE ARE NONE!
This is your worst nightmare. People who can follow their dream on sweat equity. Who with their computer and the money from their day job or mommy and daddy can compete with you. It’s like the North Vietnamese, all our military might couldn’t defeat individuals who would fight to the death. Same deal in Iraq.
It’s an eye-opener. That your model is IRRELEVANT!
YOU need to pay the mortgage. YOU need to go on vacation to the Caribbean. But the new musicians? They’re willing to sleep on the floor and eat ramen. Hell, they’re in their twenties, they’re not on the corporate track, they’ve got different ambitions!
-- Bob Lefsetz, Giving It Away (the Lefsetz Letter)
Spot on, save for one thing... They're not the new musicians, they're just the real musicians, tooled up to take on the old-guard's shenanigans, and with a general public that's re-discovering quality.