> ”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.
I think this is the steel man of “founder mode” conversation that people were obsessed with a year ago. People obsessed with “process” who are happy if nothing is accomplished because at least no policy was violated, ignoring the fact that policies were written by humans to serve the company’s goals.
Look at the FDA, where it's notoriously bogged down in red tape, and the incentives slant heavily towards rejection. This makes getting pharmaceuticals out even more expensive, and raises the overall cost of healthcare.
It's too easy to say no, and people prioritize CYA over getting things done. The question then becomes how do you get people (and orgs by extension), to better handle risk, rather than opting for the safe option at every turn?