Google cofounder and current CEO Larry Page, born in 1973, and the company’s other cofounder, Sergey Brin, strikingly demonstrated the hidden power inherent in being quick to seize on and then exploit opportunities presented by new technologies. Google not only dominates the Internet search engine market, but also the online advertising market. Today, Google has its hand in pretty much everything on the Internet, and without Page, Google would not have achieved much of it.
Once, when asked by Fortune magazine what the best piece of advice he had ever been given was, he answered: “In graduate school at Stanford University, I had about ten ideas of things I wanted to do, and one of them was to look at the link structure of the web. My advisor, Terry Winograd, picked that one out and said: ‘Well, that one seems like a really good idea.’ So I give him credit for that.”1 (We return to the importance of good advisors in Chapter 36 on Camille Pissarro.)
Together with his fellow student Sergey Brin, Larry Page set to work, and urged on by Winograd’s suggestion, ran “Project Google,” which became a company in 1998. Once the company had been founded, Page served as its CEO until 2001. Under his leadership, the company grew to 200 employees and entered the profit zone. In 2001, Page and Brin brought Eric Schmidt, the former chairman and CEO of Novell, into the company. Ever since, Page, Brin, and Schmidt have been the company’s top executives. Larry Page has personally won numerous awards, including being named a “Global Leader for Tomorrow” at the World Economic Forum in 2002. In 2009, Forbes estimated his personal fortune at around $12 billion, placing him and Brin, whose assets are similarly rated, in 26th place in the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires. So recognizing and exploiting the opportunities presented by new technologies can certainly pay off financially!
When talking about innovation, many people almost automatically think of scientific, and especially technological, innovation. Vast amounts of money are invested in these areas, and those companies that prove successful become the darlings of the business media. Newly acquired knowledge in these domains often seems to be surrounded by a fascinating aura, which may bolster the impression that this is the true pinnacle of innovation. Yet many of the innovations based on new know-how are neither scientific nor technical, but have to do with social or economic factors and therefore may not be as clearly evident to the public, even though their impact is frequently far broader.
When it comes to practical applications, all organizations should find themselves asking what opportunities might arise from their use of new technologies. At a general level, of course, today there is no longer any need to highlight the importance of electronic media, but when it comes to specifics, many organizations are lagging way behind in their use of new technologies and in their Web presence. Tremendous opportunities go begging here. At the same time, organizations’ failure to make the most of such opportunities places them at risk, totally unnecessarily, thus giving their rivals a major weakness to attack.
Moreover, this state of affairs is by no means limited to the business world. In the 2008 U.S. presidential election battle between John McCain and Barack Obama, the difference between their use of the Internet could hardly have been greater. What’s more, use of new technologies is also an issue for nonprofit organizations, universities, cultural institutions, and hospitals. Managers have a free hand when it comes to deciding how they wish to recognize and exploit new technologies, and it is astonishing how greatly direct competitors differ with respect to their use of the Internet as a platform. As long ago as September 2000, Bill Gates expressed a view that even today gives us food for thought: “The Internet is not just about new start-up companies. . .. The Internet is much more about existing businesses and how they take skills and customer base and move over to use these digital approaches to do things better. That’s the most profound thing about this revolution.”2
Larry Page and Sergey Brin succeeded in recognizing new technologies and using them to accomplish exceptional technological innovations. But even at a far more modest level, any organization can ask itself about the opportunities associated with current technological possibilities and how it could benefit from exploiting them. Bearing in mind that the Industrial Revolution turned out to be the catalyst for a long list of far-reaching innovations, we can confidently conclude that the greatest effects of the present revolution still lie ahead of us.
Despite all the praise lavished on what Google has achieved, there can be no ignoring the fact that the company’s muscle and projects that enter uncharted territory are viewed in a highly critical light. And while “Don’t be evil” may be the guideline set out in the Google Code of Conduct,3 and no one could wish the company and Google’s users much better than success in following that principle, there are already serious problems in answering questions like, “What is evil?” and, “Who defines the answer?”
Where do you see opportunities in your organization to make more effective use of new technologies? Who could drive these issues forward?
In which domains can you personally derive greater benefit from new technologies?