Google CEO Sundar Pichai Brings in Less Egotistical Leadership
recode.net
recode.net
I watched an interview by Charlie Rose of Google's operation guy called Lazlo, I thought it was a great interview. He said having intellectual humility is important (does not mean less ego), which is the curiosity to learn or accept if you were wrong. Ego I am not convinced is such a harmful thing, and lets not say it is harmful just because many software engineers being introverts have a confirmation bias against it.
How is asking pointed questions and making cutting observations equate to being unsympathetic ? If you care about succeeding, this type of feedback is invaluable. If you don't, then you are more likely going to use the 'he is not very nice' card to get out doing any good work.
Some people will power through that sort of criticism. Some people will thrive under it. And quite a few people, including very smart and hardworking people, will be gradually demoralized by it.
As a manager, to whatever extent you are gradually demoralizing your team, you are creating inefficiencies. You are creating burnout problems, which may become turnover problems. You also risk inadvertently creating a yes-man culture, in which your opinions are deemed unassailable, and/or everyone just wants to avoid public conflict with you, and thus pleasing you becomes people's primary intellectual objective.
I've never worked for Larry Page, have no firsthand experience with his management style, and don't mean this as a commentary about him. But I have worked for people who fit this description, and while it didn't bother me too much, it sure bothered a lot of great people to an unnecessary degree.
How you give feedback matters almost as much as the accuracy or insight of your feedback.
I think it's pretty clear that the feedback could have been given in a more constructive manner.
Hello X, while I think you have done these three features A, B, C well....blah blah, you could do E in a better way by doing 1,2,3. This superfluity can add up, making some people get straight to the point.
If your team feel insulted/humiliated/upset, they are less likely to produce the right outcome in the short or long term.
Any decent manager can ask the right questions and make accurate observations whilst still making their team feel positive and valued.
Blaming their feelings on the manager, rather than their own egos, is wrong and harmful.
Also, give credit to your team, take blame yourself. That's s rule 2. Any industry, any job, these rules hold, and anyone who doesn't follow them is dysfunctional.
I don't get why people are so attracted to this idea that the manager is the only party with any agency or ability to influence outcomes, while underlings are merely mechanical cogs to be properly organized by appropriate managerial incantations and social engineering.
As an underling it's great to be responsible for nothing negative, but this also means you don't really deserve much credit for the positives. Managers might throw false praise your way to manipulate you - as per your suggestion - but who cares about that?
With this mental model, of course it's false praise, just like it would be false praise for me to give credit to my hardware.
Now I don't buy this model. But this is the logical implication of it - success is the flip side of failure.
There is no universal definition of an asshole, and no one is safe from being an asshole in someone's eyes, so moving right past it is definitely a valid, useful strategy.
However, I will say that one trick I've learned over the years is to "frame the questions" as though you're both on the same side of the dialogue. You're both fighting against the thing on the other side of the table, which is the functionality / app you're creating. If you can frame questions in that way, to ensure people don't feel they're on the receiving end of personal attacks, this is invaluable and makes it easier for people to accept those "pointed questions" as valid criticism, and helps them realize that you're asking the questions only because of your undying desire to get things right. It keeps people from feeling under attack when anything they're working on gets questioned / interrogated.
While many times people think the boss always thinks they're right, generally those people are just more timid than the average person I think. If they opened up and disagreed or questioned parts of the interrogation they would realize the questioner is only opening a dialogue, not establishing that they're always going to be right and that the person needs to "fall in line".
(Robust people ask why not both?)
I suspect part of it is them hedging against real backlash against concerns about advertisement as surveillance.
No, the new one isn't motivated to get you to click the link, and therefore is not "clickbait". It is editorialized, but that's a good thing.
It's still clickbait because it makes an unjustified, subjective judgement.
The "I'm the smartest person in the world, because I work at Google" attitude is a reason I don't interact with/communicate with/contribute to Google-related projects. Their hugely inflated egos are just off-putting.
After I joined, I kept waiting for the hammer to fall, to see the competitive mean streak in people and in my team at least, it was exactly the opposite. It's frankly the best environment I've worked in because they are genuinely caring people.
Now, it's not all rainbows and unicorns. I've also run into the aspergers poster child, into the competitive assholes, but I don't have to deal with any of these in my daily life. So, yes, there are assholes, but I don't think this is the norm.
They are incredibly helpful, and very tolerant of newbies like me who sometimes ask dumb questions...
Honestly, think about how many companies let their nerdiest of engineers be the public face of projects. The reputation is easy to come by when your front is not a "people person".
Plus, Google's huge and has very few internal communication barriers --- nearly everything is open to everyone. So it's really easy to get into the habit of casually talking about internal products when talking shop.
Then you notice someone nearby who isn't a Googler, and you go oh shit and stop talking.
It may be usual and common for Google employees to do that. That doesn't make it excusable, and it's a pretty big reason why I, too, tend to avoid gatherings where I know it's going to be a bunch of Google employees. They communicate that they don't want outsiders around? I can oblige.
I have not had an issue with any interactions with any Google-backed projects.
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Oh, and if you are a cat person, become a dog person before joining the company.
IMHO if Google had just kept G+ on its own (working hard on fixing the "ghost town" byproduct of evolved privacy features, and providing decent APIs), adoption numbers could have been lower in the short term, but the product would have survived in the long run. Integration with other Google products should have come naturally, not forcefully. Then we would have got a modern social network people actually wanted to join, instead of a tainted product stinking of corporate malfeasance.
I also don't think that creator's ego is a factor in product's success. There are many egotistical entrepreneurs with successful products. People might not like creators, but they like the product.
So isn't the best strategy to let the market determine if something is worth it or not? I'm sure G+ has got its valuation...
No, it is not. If I decide to change the design of a bicycle to have square shaped wheels I have not innovated. I have instead made it objectively worse.
I think to innovate is generally accepted as meaning to improve upon something in some way. I don't think G+ improved anything, as its abject failure in the real world demonstrates.
Yahoo search did make money with banner advertisements, and when that was doing well people called Yahoo search innovative. Innovation is used like a buzz word. Truly anything new, even if it is poorer than the previous product is innovation, it may not sell, but it is innovation!
We could call it "The Book of Graham".
High egotism -> high conscious opinion of one's self (compensating for low subconscious self-worth), need for external affirmation of self-worth, and propensity for aggression and meanness in the pursuit of that affirmation.
Low egotism -> content with self-worth, unreactive to external criticism or praise, willingness to do what is "for the greater good" regardless of short term challenges and resistance, trusting one's self to achieve the best outcome in the end.
Modern management is trying to apply command and control to creative endeavours, and usually forces everyone to fail.
Sometimes it's possible to wander around, rejecting the views of everyone else and creating a perfect product. More often you get something no one wants.
A better approach is to have enough time and money to walk in the right direction, carefully. No matter how many times I think of the idea of a start up running ahead I think of disorganised mob, not a disciplined army.
The goal is to take a disciplined army into the unknown.
not a rabble egged on by a crazy guy, or a goose.
When a group of very smart people get together, there is a tendency for them to try to show themselves as being the smartest. This can lead to less-desirable situations where people don't share or cooperate as freely as they should. In the worst cases the situation could become antagonistic with individuals or entire teams and departments refusing to talk to each other. Now in a group of smart people, walks in a person like Sundar Pichai, someone without ego, who always defers to the other person, who might put himself/herself down to make the other person feel better. When two people in the group get into a conflict on an issue (remember this is a group that can get into religious wars over which brace style to use), it will be that person who mediates and gets the team going again. When the team has to vote on a new leader, that person is likely to get the most votes because he/she is the person everyone has the least issues with. Such a person who avoids conflict is able to act as transcendental force. People are more willing to listen to such a person or do what he/she says because they don't feel threatened by him/her.
Someone like Steve Jobs who always puts himself above everyone else, could also act as a transcendental force as long as people agree to that. But if someone like Steve Jobs was to start at the bottom of the organisation, and moves up the ladder to its top position, it would be by putting other people and teams down. These people might harbour a grudge or ill-will and be less likely to do what the new boss says. It is not a strategy without its downsides (For example why did someone as incredibly gifted as Steve Wozniak end up leaving Apple?).
By promoting similar people to leadership positions, Pichai is creating a environment where people with great talent but less taste for politics can also get their voice heard. I think such an environment is good for creativity to flourish.
"A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit."
Not to take anything away from Sundar Pichai's accomplishments, but Tamil Nadu, from where he hails, is decidedly not "one of the poorest states in India." It has the second largest gross state domestic product in the country. [1]