Leadership Lessons from Google

from Management.Fortune.CNN.com 5/12 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz 6/14

Larry Page has spent his entire career at Google, and while he remains something of an enigma, his leadership style & ideals are becoming increasingly clear. He talks about them in Commencement speeches, in talks to Faculty, and to co-workers & Google executives.

Larry Page’s Management Style is relevant to anyone who’s growing a business or looking to stay ahead of fierce competitors, not to mention complacency. Here, then, are five leadership strategies from Larry Page:

1. Pay attention to your Crazy Ideas & cultivate the best of them. “Talk about the future,” Page told University of Michigan’s Engineering graduates in 2005 — back when Google had 3,500 employees. It now has over 14x as about – 50,000 (5/14). Page urges his teams to believe in “audacious” ideas. By tackling big ideas “that could really change the world,” you attract incredibly “smart people” and achieve something worthwhile, even if it’s not your original goal, he said at the Google Faculty Summit in 2009. The Google group researching Artificial Intelligence instead came up with the Ad Targeting system, which accounts for almost half of revenues, said Page, adding: “That’s a pretty good side effect.”

1a) Making a Dream, reality !!! The idea for Google’s dominant Search Engine came to Page in a dream about downloading the entire web and keeping the links, he told Michigan graduates. “When no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition,” he said. Page is “very engaged in what challenges people face,” and his engineering brain often kicks in, says Grady Burnett, who led Google’s AdWords office in Ann Arbor for five years and now works for Facebook. That perspective is backed up with the multi- $Billions Google has in cash & marketable securities — and with a research & development budget last year of $5 billion.

2a. Build your Team. For years, Page insisted on being involved in every hire at Google. Many of his early hires were graduates of University of Michigan or Stanford University – where he & co-founder Sergey Brin met while in graduate school. While some have left to establish their own companies, many have stuck around because of his approach. Three of the six people recently promoted to lead Google’s major product divisions are among the first 10 or so employees the company hired, dating back to 1998. “It’s remarkable,” says Steven Levy, author of the recently published book In the Plex, a look inside Google. “Those people are rich enough to buy anything — and they’re still working, committing to a few more years” with the company. “It’s a belief in Larry,” says Levy, who is also a senior writer for Wired.

[2b) avoid Bureaucracy. 3. Be quick; Be concise !!! 4. Recognize the “significance” of Small Moves. 5. Persevere, in Premium Content ]