> ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios.
That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.
My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action". There are definitely limits on this, but it's been helpful when dealing with various internal negotiations. I don't spend as much time looking to "align with stakeholders", I just go ahead and do things my decades of experience have taught me are the right paths (while also using my experience to know when I can't just push things through).
What worked well for extracting profits from stable cash cows doesn't work in fields that are moving rapidly.
Google et al. were at one point pinnacle technologies too, but this was 20 years ago. Everyone who knew how to work in that environment has moved on or moved up.
Were I the CEO of a company like that I'd reduce headcount in the legacy orgs, transition them to maintenance mode, and start new orgs within the company that are as insulated from legacy as possible. This will not be an easy transition, and will probably fail. The alternative however is to definitely fail.
For example Google is in the amazing position that it's search can become a commodity that prints a modest amount of money forever as the default search engine for LLM queries, while at the same time their flagship product can be a search AI that uses those queries as citations for answers people look for.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=46
Every tech industry executive has read that book and most large companies have at least tried to put it into practice. For example, Google has "X" (the moonshot factory, not the social media platform formerly known as Twitter).
A better example would be Calico, which faced significant struggles getting access to internal Google resources, while also being very secretive and closed off (the term used was typically an "all-in bet" or an "all-out bet", or something in between. Verily just underwent a decoupling from Google because Alphabet wants to sell it.
I think if you really want to survive cycles of the innovator's dilemma, you make external orgs that still share lines of communications back to the mothership, maintaining partial ownership, and occasionally acquiring these external startups.
I work in Pharma and there's a common pattern of acquiring external companies and drugs to stay relevant. I've definitely seen multiple external acquisitions "transform" the company that acquires them, if for no other reason than the startup employees have a lot more gumption and solved problems the big org was struggling with.
Even internal to MS I worked on 2 teams that were 95% independent from the mothership, on one of them (Microsoft Band) we even went to IKEA and bought our own desks.
Pretty successful in regards to getting a product to market (Band 1 and 2 all up had iirc $50M in funding compared to Apple Watch's billion), but the big company politics still got us in the end.
Of course Xbox is the most famous example of MS pulling off an internal skunk works project leading to massive success.