Marissa Mayer speech at Stanford on innovation at Google (23 minutes, 26 minutes question and answers). She leads the product management efforts on Google’s search products- web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Excellent speech. Highly recommended. 9 ideas:
(inside these are Marissa’s comments) [inside these are my comments]
Ideas come from anywhere (engineers, customers, managers, executives, external companies – that Google acquires)
Users not money [the opposite of what business school's teach business case]
Don’t kill projects morph them
42:22 into the video she answers about how to motivate employees now, given the changes at Google… I think she gives a great answer which without stating it this way is essentially that Google employees are intrinsically motivated. And it echos the quote we posted a couple days ago by Guy Kawasaki “the key to getting great people to work for you is to have a great product.” It isn’t about motivating employees, see: Stop Demotivating Employees and McGregor on theory y. Her answer could have gone into much more detail on this topic, but it was much better than most answers to such questions that immediately jump to extrinsic motivation thinking.
“There’s a reason we talk about 70/20/10, where 70% of our resources are spent in our core business and 10% end up in unrelated projects, like energy or whatever. [The other 20% goes to projects adjacent to the core business.] Actually, it’s a struggle to get it to even be 10%…”
Kenji Hiranabe talks about Toyota’s development process (webcast). Kenji shares a presentation he attended earlier this year by Nobuaki Katayama, a former Chief Engineer at Toyota, and the lessons he learned from him…
April 30th, 2008 at 11:21 am
“There’s a reason we talk about 70/20/10, where 70% of our resources are spent in our core business and 10% end up in unrelated projects, like energy or whatever. [The other 20% goes to projects adjacent to the core business.] Actually, it’s a struggle to get it to even be 10%…”
September 18th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Kenji Hiranabe talks about Toyota’s development process (webcast). Kenji shares a presentation he attended earlier this year by Nobuaki Katayama, a former Chief Engineer at Toyota, and the lessons he learned from him…