> ”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.
Search is not a commodity. Search providers other than Google are only marginally used because Google is so dominant. At the same time, when LLMs companies can start providing a better solution to the actual job of finding answers to user queries, then Google's dominance is disrupted and their future business is no longer guaranteed. Maintaining Google search infra to serve as a search backbone is not big enough for Google.