What's the big idea?

What’s the big idea?

I love this ad from Googlers Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg for so many reasons. It’s simple, tells a great story, tells it with pictures and makes you root for the authors. I want to talk to you about one of the most powerful insights I pulled from their book, How Google Works, when I first read it years ago. Just in case you don’t know their story, these two gentlemen were brought to Google after their early success to help the company “grow up.” They went into Google with years of experience leading large companies and loads of case studies from their MBA programs under their belt. They also brought with them countless assumptions that would eventually be disproven. Thanks to their open minds and willingness to change what they “knew”, they were able to lead Google to what all of us know it to be today. To sum it all up, their willingness to explicitly define their assumptions and test them openly is what makes the difference at Google.

For two gentlemen with so much business success under their belts, I’ve never read anyone with so much humility. The authors never claimed to be experts in anything. They even made a prediction (and practically a plea) for a likely successor to assume Google’s place in the business world. Not like they really wanted another business to “beat” Google, they just know what most of us infinite players know:

The game keeps going long after we’ve stopped playing.

Therefore, we have a responsibility to focus on keeping the game worth playing for others who are going to remain in play after we’re gone. This means we need to be ready to responsibly challenge the “rules” that govern our world. However, we live in a world with many finite players in it. They know the rules, many benefit from them, and will fight like hell to keep them in play. You better come with a much better set of rules if you’re going to convince enough players to change. This is where these Google guys really shine.

They don’t try to change the world by forcing people to do it. They make predictions about which direction they think the world’s going to go and then run tiny experiments to give them enough evidence of which direction the world is actually going. They mention before any project gets approved at Google, teams are required to include an explanation of “the big idea.” They want to know what big assumption the team is making. They want to know what insights you have to support this position today. Then, you just need to include a schedule of what you need to learn next to feel more confident about your position. This means the “project plan” is not a collection of products to be shipped. It’s actually just a ton of experiments that help the project team figuring out if their version of the future is panning out.

My big idea is that the days of corporate employees expecting cushy and insulated jobs with clearly defined roles are gone. Whether you call yourself an engineer, scientist, analyst, you are going to need to know how to sell things. You are going to need to learn how to actually run a business. Your corporate team or initiative is facing more competition (even the internal kind) than ever. If you want to “move up” in a world without corporate ladders, you are going to have to learn how to become a router.

Scott WeidnerJune 6, 2018