Category Archives: Leadership

Foundation, Leadership, Society

Innovation vs Dogma

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« I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it ». This maxim is wrongly-attributed to Voltaire. And it might just be what Google needs. Indeed, the current Google situation is a typical situation of Innovation vs Dogma.

Back to facts
  • In the course of the summer 2017, a memo by Google employee James Damore leaks out, stating that (in short) women are biologically not meant to be engineers…
  • James Damore gets fired
  • Google CEO Sundai Pichar needs to cancel a company-wide interactive session about gender discrimination, after several employees complained that they would not be able to express their views without retaliation from fellow employees.
Quick disclaimer

Just to set things straight: this blog is not about opinions. However, we think it relevant to point to scientific research which prove James Damore wrong. Also, we can’t emphasize enough how women greatly contributed to science and computing. Marie Curie and Dame Stephanie Shirley are enough to ridicule the whole career achievements of James Damore.

Google wanted so much to be inclusive that it got exclusive

But back to Voltaire: an innovative company must allow anyone to feel comfortable being who they are, regardless of political opinions. The Google situation is a meaningful management lesson: Google wanted so much to be inclusive that it got exclusive.

It is hard for a company that excels so much in not paying taxes to pretend to work for the good of humanity. Kittens don’t replace schools, hospitals or roads — and these are paid by taxes. “Don’t do evil” was Google’s mantra — which Steve Jobs rightfully called “Bullshit”.

Nevertheless, from a very cynical business perspective, Google needs inclusive values, because:

  • It is good for its image. When your whole business is based on spying on people, and that the NSA leverages that to get info on millions of citizens, you needs to work on how you are perceived by society.
  • It promotes a culture of performance. Not matter who you are, we only value what you produce.
  • It increases resources in the long term. Exclude women and your world is 50% smaller. Add to this non-caucasians, homosexuals, and republicans, and you’ll be quickly in shortage of workforce and customers.

The problem is that embracing inclusiveness may be dogmatic, when it means that alternative opinions are excluded. For example, some moderate conservatives start to feel uneasy working at Google. Being inclusive to this extent is being exclusive.

Instead, Google needs to worry about its innovation culture. It needs to make sure that inclusiveness applies to its employee’s careers. If James Damore was not valuing any woman engineer, maybe his job performance would show it. This is when communication does not replace action. James Damore may have been fired to quickly close the topic, it may actually have opened a pandora box and create a deadly fight internally to the company.

Democracy and capitalism

In order not to do evil, Google needs to learn to actually be inclusive: by paying taxes, by participating in society at large without taking part in the debate, and by enforcing performance metrics that are affected by inclusiveness. In short, accept not to be in control of everything, as long as it allowed the debate to take place. Let’s call that … democracy?

Disruption, Innovation, Leadership, New business

Leadership in innovation

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In a panel I organized about innovation, a major bank’s innovation director explained how the risk for failure had to be borne by the organization itself, not the individual. This raises the question of leadership in innovation, and I would like to illustrate this concept by a concrete example.

Company A is a leader in its market, having internally developed a solution which gathered several awards from recognized institutions. It is widely believed in the company that this solution is key to the commercial success it experiences on its market. So, at the end, everyone feels good about this cost center.

Since company A is so proud about this solution, one considered selling it to other similar companies in different (read: non-competing) geographies. Minimal resources are allocated for over a year to that purpose, and actual revenue objectives given to a business unit. Finally, one day, “out of the blue”, a large company’s top management contacts A to know more about this solution. Their financial advisers had told them about it — always consider investors’ presentation as a marketing tool for your know-how. Company A joins the RFP bandwagon, gets short-listed, and now feels that things are getting serious.

As deal closing gets close to real, everyone at A gets nervous:

  • the “international” business unit needs to write a contract
  • the lawyers need to back a deal in a foreign jurisdiction
  • the technical team worries about committing on a project in someone else’s technical environment
  • the operations team is wondering how they will work with the customer’s employees and how they will share responsibilities for failures
  • the CFO needs to deal with a foreign currency and country risks
  • a “domestic” business unit, whose revenue depend on company A’s solution, fears that it might lose resources and control over the roadmap — with no upside potential.

All this is crystallized when the deal needs board approval as per A’s governance rules. Risks suddenly get over-estimated, and everyone hides behinds the uncertainties. In short, people are telling the board why this new business should be dismissed, instead of explaining how work could be done. So A is in a situation where it spent resources during over a year on a new kind business, but finds itself reluctant to get real when it finally gets a potential customer.

What is needed in this situation is an actual leader.

R Branson quote

The role of a leader in innovation is two-fold:

  • reassure the teams that s/he will be responsible for what will be done. This means protecting the careers of those who will contribute, as well as giving them the right excuse to change the way they work with others. In this case, the domestic business unit has a roadmap and an existing business based on the solution. Having another company profiting from the same technical team means that the engineers will have to priorize some of its requests. These engineers need this leader to explain the hard truth to the domestic business unit, in the company’s general interest. Same thing when/if a feature gets broken as part of incremental software development.
  • create a team spirit around an ambition. Large structures tend to consider employees as disposable resources, but in this case key resources need to be motivated about this new development. Key contributors need regular updates about the project, a proper kick-off and a good story about where they are heading. Otherwise, why would they bother trading their comfortable, deterministic life against a new set of issues?

As is usually said, leadership is not a given: it has to be taken. Company culture plays an important role in having someone stepping in and be the leader. For example, you may have already seen freshly-nominated directors pretending “to have done that great thing”, much to the deception of the actual do-ers. But when real leadership happens, the impossible gets done: contributors will work smarter and harder to make everyone in the team succeed. Not a given, and not possible in every company, but a clear signal for success.