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Former Google CIO Suggests 'Do Dumb Things'
itwbennett writes "Speaking at the CA Expo in Sydney, Australia, former Google CIO Douglas Merrill shared some management tips he learned during his tenure at the search giant. At the top of the list: 'Don't be afraid to do dumb things.' Merrill recalls that 'most of the early Google hardware was stolen from trash and as the stuff they stole broke all the time they built a reliable software system. Everyone knew we shouldn't build our own hardware as it was 'dumb', but everyone was wrong. Sometimes being dumb changes the game.' Another pearl of wisdom from Merrill: 'the more project management you do the less likely your project is to succeed.'"
is he saying that if the hardware he made was, say, 20% more power hungry and 10% more expensive it would have rendered Google's business idea unworkable. I'm not sure I buy it. Maybe it allowed him to scale up with less capital, but I think a 20% slower google would still have won hearts and minds during the period it was being created.
Nullius in verba
I think most project managers are a waste as well. In a small company it is unneeded. I'm more circumspect to say whether or not they're needed in a big company, but they certainly seem less needed in small, closely connected groups. If you have a big, long project, with people from different divisions doing different things, then yes, a project manager can be helpful. On a small project, with a few people, who work closely already on a variety of things, project managers just tend to get in the way. I don't know how many projects I've been brought into at the last minute because someone quit or whatever, and the PM points to my place on the timeline - I'm already two weeks late in finishing whatever is supposed to be done on the day I'm brought into the project. It's just completely pointless aside from those large collaborations that cross across many people in many different groups at a company.
"the more project management you do the less likely your project is to succeed."
There is quite a lot of truth to this statement.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
Google succeeded because it was at the right time at the right place. Nothing else. Yes, there were other search engines before it, but Google set a standard and ran with it. Try the same approach in the same field of business today and you will fail. Invariably. Likewise with the next EBay, the next Amazon, the next Facebook. No, they were not the first. But they were amongst the first and they were there and "the best" at just the right time when the service they offered suddenly got popular.
That's all that is to their success. Nothing more, nothing less. Just pure luck. You might also say good timing, but I kinda doubt anyone can actually predict so accurately when which service hits the sweet spot. If he could, most of these services would be in one hand. Why? Because that person/organization would have hit the sweet spots more often than anyone else. Duh.
I wouldn't take any advice from any of those "successful" companies. They didn't do anything right where everyone else was too stupid. They were just lucky to be the one that were lucky enough to be the one being at the right place at the right time with the right product.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Does anyone here even read the summary together with the article itself and see if it makes sense? He did *not* say "do dumb things". That statement implies that you know its a dumb thing to do and it will not work, yet you do it anyway. In this case you *are* dumb and should be fired. He said "don't be afraid to do dumb things", which has a totally different meaning. It means that you should try approaches that may be non-obvious, but at least you are attempting to solve whatever the problem at hand is in an ingenious way. Sometimes it does not work and you look foolish, but you often get innovative solutions to tough problems.
Project management is an inverted parabola. Too little and you will fail due to lack of direction and budget, too much and you will smother it.
Every single major corporation does dumb things all the time! Incompetence is rampant! That means, logically, if you want to create a major corporation, you need to cultivate a culture of incompetence and stupidity.
I am officially gone from
Continuing this line of thought, Merrill said, "Put all your eggs in one basket; Count your chickens before they hatch. Serve some wine before its time, find yourself an itch to scratch."
Bow-ties are cool.
if you do too little, you won't know that you failed.
heya,
Well, I started reading the top and it sounded reasonable (terrible English aside)...lol....
But then I got to the gist of it. The guy wants Google (and Google Plus) to list his real name as "CopyLion". Like, seriously?
Ok, I know HK's have zany names (one of my best friend's is called "Alpha"), but really? *shakes heads*.
I mean, my name is "Victor" - that's an anglicisation we picked up. My Chinese name is "XiaoKang", which is rendered as my middle name in English. Whenever anybody asks for my name, I give it the same as it's written on my birth certificate, or passport. I'm not going to try and inject something weird like Victor "THE AWESOMENESS" Hooi is my real name...
All of these whiney HK people have real names, jeez. Just render them as PinYin, as I did, and put that as your real name.
This CopyLion dude even gives us an example himeself (or herself) - CHAN, Tai Man . There you go - his name is "Tai Man Chan". Problem solved.
It's funny how they're trying to fly the OH NOES YOUR RACIST!!! flag to try to sneak in using nicknames, and get around rules...lol.
Cheers,
Victor
its funny how the uber wealthy have advice like 'its not about the money', 'take risks' ' you can always start over' 'the economy isn't that bad' etc etc.
Sure, they made it and we didn't, but it does taint their objectiveness to towards the real world.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
From TFA:
"Don't be afraid to do dumb things. Larry and Sergey developed a search product called 'Backrub' - don't ask me how they got that - and shortly after that launched Google as part of the Stanford domain. Most of the early Google hardware was stolen from trash and as the stuff they stole broke all the time they built a reliable software system."
So this brings back one of my fondest IT memories. One week in the late 90s, I went down to the bay area for some very expensive naptime my employers referred to as "training." While I was down there I got to visit with a lot of old friends, including one brilliant network engineer who shall remain nameless. He took the lot of us on a tour of the colocation cages of his employer's datacenter, which featured a number of dotcom era luminaries. After oohing and aahing over the very shiny, very expensive servers of Angelfire, eBay, Lycos and others, we came to the end of a long hallway. To our right was a small cage with a single 19" rack in it. It was the ugliest rack you could hope to imagine. Naked motherboards were slotted in every inch, and a massive rat's nest of CAT-5 cables spilling out the front like it had puked up a lunch of yellow spaghetti. You could even see hard loose hard drives sitting on some of the motherboards, using swatches of gray foam as "mounting hardware." It was awesomely horrible. We had to know who was responsible for this monolith of kludge, and of course this was the moment he was waiting for.
"Oh. That's Google."
And with that our tour was over.
This is like asking a 110-year-old man how he got to live to be so old, him answering that he ate Ho-Hos every day, and then you adding Ho-Hos to your daily diet. Forget correlation != causality. There's not even any correlation here.
pragmatism, that's what it was. Look up the definition. Although saying 'be pragmatic' is not as quotable as saying be dumb' and meaning be pragmatic.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
I'm trying to change the game by making this dumb post. Now mod me +5 Insightful.
So what's the statute of limitations regarding stealing from the trash? Anyone know?
Google CIO:
I believe that this yet another area in which I am well ahead of the curve.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You never learn from your success, only from your failure. If you succeed, you cannot be sure it wasn't just dumb luck; when you fail, you know there is only one person to blame.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Therefore, my advice is, put your finger into a light socket. The fact I did dumb things precedes my luck, so now I can give dumb advice from experience.
Gently reply
This is a case where I wish I hadn't RTFA. None of these glib aphorisms turn full circle. It scares me that he's willing to throw out dangerous sound-bites with no guard rails for the unwary.
I think he also has a bad case of bafflegab envy: where your investors decide your company is worth twice as much because everything you say runs against common sense. We've had a few investment cycles where all the money was chasing after anti-gravity machines.
No doubt you can dress funny on the road to success if you're funded to twice the level that any rational person would pony into. This is the "Confederacy of Dunces" business model. Works great if you can pull it off.
Still stupid even if it was the GP's own estimate. A good PM would have sat down with him to see how to improve the estimate for next time. There are good methods for that.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
You have to remember that this was during the last bubble and Google is rather famous for going against the flow. "Everyone" was using the investment money to buy Sun hardware with Oracle databases and those expensive chairs. Google went dumpster diving and because that ZERO cost hardware failed all the time came up with software that could deal with unreliable hardware meaning that google never had to buy 5 nine hardware at insane prices.
This was repeated by Facebook. You will find endless experts claiming you could never scale either PHP or MySql to be a serious site, yet one of the largest sites in the world runs on those two. Same as google proved linux was far more capable then just being a hobby OS for nerds. And proved it again with Android.
Google could afford to offer gmail with insane storage space because they had a very cheap hardware infrastructure. Had they build it with "proper" hardware and software the costs would have been astronomical.
But hey, you know better then Google because you run what mega-corp?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.