This is a pretty insightful article. I would just add that nearly every large company follows this same arc. It used to be said about IBM, back in their dominant days, that their product bureaucracy was such that it would take them nine months to ship an empty box.

Relative to yesterday's comments about "wartime CEOs and peacetime CEOs", he says:

> a soft peacetime culture

Also:

> Within Google, there is a collective delusion that the company is exceptional. And as is the case in all such delusions, the deluded ones are just mortals standing on the shoulders of the truly exceptional people who went before them and created an environment of wild success. Eventually, the exceptional environment starts to fade, but the lingering delusion has abolished humility among the mere mortals who remain.

I summarized this yesterday (quoting someone else) as "born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."