Chaos by design by Adam Lashinsky:
Sandberg recently committed an error that cost Google several million dollars — “Bad decision, moved too quickly, no controls in place, wasted some money,” is all she’ll say about it — and when she realized the magnitude of her mistake, she walked across the street to inform Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and unofficial thought leader. “God, I feel really bad about this,” Sandberg told Page, who accepted her apology. But as she turned to leave, Page said something that surprised her. “I’m so glad you made this mistake,” he said. “Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.”
A bit unconventional: and not right for every business. But for Google this makes sense to me, and it has been working well for them. Google hired Shona Brown, as senior vice president for business operations in 2003. In 1998 she authored - Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos.
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October 8th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
[...] Shona Brown, Senior Vice President, Business Operations, has a bachelor of computer systems engineering degree from Carleton University in Canada and a master’s degree in economics and philosophy from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. She received her Ph.D. and Post-Doctorate from Stanford University’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management. Our management blog mentioned her last month: Chaos Management (by design) at Google - and her book, Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. [...]
October 9th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
[...] Shona Brown, Senior Vice President, Business Operations, Google, has a bachelor of computer systems engineering degree from Carleton University in Canada and a master’s degree in economics and philosophy from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. She received her Ph.D. and Post-Doctorate from Stanford University’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management. Our management blog mentioned her last month: Chaos Management (by design) at Google - and her book, Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. [...]