Professor Elam

Aparently Google liked Shona Brown’s Competing on the Edge: Strategy as a Structured Chaos , hired her as Vice President for Business Operations.

It’s all here in an article brought to my attention by alert student Guadalups Barraza.  Chaos by Design  is the story of unstructured Google.  IT details how Google is generating more than $800 M incash each quarter.Larry Page cautions against being too cautious and doing too little, if we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risks."  Remember that Clint E. said the same thing, doing the same old thing is risky because nothing ever changes.  That’s why you see old tv shows being made in to movies.  No risk, no gain.

Engineers are supposed to spen 20% of their time pursuing their own ideas.  But Google has plenty of mistakes to show for its efforts too, Froogle never did much.  Their version of My Space, Orkut (huh?) only succeeded in Brazil, well and Iran….

Well strategy is a management discipline but sounds like managerial accounting to me, how do you foster creativity to get truly breakthrough new ideas?  Apple finally did it with iPod, but wandered in the tech wilderness for years first. MSFT has yet to do better than Windows or Office. 

This was an article well worth reading, thanks Guadalupe.

DLE

PS Competing is only eight bucks at Amazon, better earmark that for a future book report!