Google: The Game Plan
December 23, 2022
I read “You Have Reached Your Destination: Google Elegantly Says Goodbye to Waze.” I was thinking that a better title may have suggested that Google has displayed its strategic ways. Not to be.
The article recycles a familiar story. Think Dodgeball. Buy a product. Big opportunities exist with other services that Google wants to “put wood behind.” The future is elsewhere. Hasta la vista “old stuff” for pastures whose harvesting delivers more compensation, influence, and bonus bucks.
Google recycles its hasta la vista language. The article quotes some:
Waze will continue to operate under a separate application and brand. “Google remains deeply committed to Waze’s unique brand, its beloved app and its thriving community of volunteers and users,” the company said in a statement.
Hello, interns and new hires. Work on Waze. Look for something hot like the new moon shot to solve death, for example.
The article suggests what’s behind Google’s buy, ignore, milk, and let die products and services:
Google, instead of seeing Waze as a brand to be nurtured and promoted, treated it as an incubator of ideas that should be exploited. “Every idea we had was quickly adopted by Google Maps,” he wrote. Nor did the company use its vast resources to attract new users to Waze.
Interesting. Same old song.
The reality is that Google struggles, in my opinion, to come to grips with these issues:
- Ad revenue is the goal. Products and services which do not deliver Google scale payoffs are doomed unless the service is a fave of senior management or part of an initiative to kill off Amazon, Microsoft, and others deemed to be non-Googley
- Incentives affect products. When services don’t change or are lousy, the engineers able to make a difference are working on more lucrative opportunities for themselves. How’s that search working for you? What about that Gmail interface? Great, right?
- Google’s senior management is not sure how to reduce costs, amp up revenue, innovate, and avoid getting crushed with administrivia like personnel issues, government regulation, and ageing infrastructure.
Net net: Send Waze down the Orkut path is easy and part of the so-called culture of the GOOG. There’s nothing fancy, subtle, or complex in what Google does as it faces increasing internal and external pressure.
It’s high school science club management methods in action.
Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2022
Google and Its Hard Data Approach to a Soft Skill: Firing People
December 5, 2022
Who knew that Google would embrace highly subjective methods such as performance reviews. Yep, a person provides input about another person. What could go wrong? Nothing because the data are Googley by definition. (Interesting how that works, isn’t it?)
The scoop on the method plus a somewhat less than enthusiastic comment are the guts of “Google’s Plan to Lay Off 10,000 Poor Performing Employees Is Based on a Big Lie: Can Performance Reviews Really Do the Trick.”
The Google approach appears to equate fewer employees with lower costs. Okay, sure. But why not focus on the core problem: For me, Google is losing its magnetism. The company like Apple is embracing more aggressive methods of generating revenue. Do you enjoy the promotions for Google’s spin on cable TV? I love them: Repetitive and invasive. What’s not to like.
Here’s the Google plan:
Reports indicate that performance reviews are rolling out companywide. Google leadership is turning to the reviews so that they can rely on supposedly hard data to maintain fairness, remove bias, protect against favoritism, and have something to point to when needing to justify their decision for which 10,000 get laid off.
But the information in the write up which caught my attention was this passage’s payload:
But, according to this Harvard professor, [the write up in the best tradition of Silicon Valley real news does not identify Tsedal Neeley as the expert who is calling Google’s method hogwash] it’s all one big lie. Many experts claim that the layoffs in big tech are the result of new corporate strategy, failed big bets coming out of the pandemic, and austerity measures entering the recession. This angers the public (not to mention the employees at these companies), because now the decision feels less objective — less fair.
My take on this is that Google’s multi-decade approach has been a high school science club approach to management. Now the company is embracing the ways of the dinobabies. Will this work? In my opinion, it will work like most of Google’s technology, in a way that is good enough.
Google’s personnel milestones include some notable, high profile events. My hunch is that 2023 will feature some newsworthy benchmarks as well; for example, fairness, equal treatment for those from certain backgrounds, and unbiased selection of those who can find their future elsewhere.
Worth watching because the Twitter email notification about termination may be an ideal fit for Gmail’s capabilities.
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2022
Google Revises Guest Speakers Rule to Avoid Future Controversy
December 2, 2022
Here’s another example of high school science club management in action. Free thinking and cultural sensitivity seem to be in a constant tug-of-war. Finding itself caught in the middle, “Google Fixes Rules for Inviting Guest Speakers to Its Offices After Recent Row Over Indian Speaker,” Gadgets 360 shares. Reuters explains:
“Alphabet’s Google this week introduced rules for inviting guest speakers to its offices, days after it canceled a talk by an Indian historian who has disparaged marginalised groups and their concerns, according to company emails seen by Reuters. The policy released Thursday is Google’s latest effort to preserve an open culture while addressing divisions that have emerged as its workforce has grown.
Workers at Google and other big tech companies in recent years have clashed and protested over politics and racial and gender equity. Also, Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon all face union organising drives whose demands include that the companies adopt progressive policies. The Google speaker rules, seen by Reuters, cite risk to the brand from certain talks and asks workers to ‘consider whether there’s a business reason for hosting the speaker and if the event directly supports our company goals.’ It calls for avoiding topics that could be ‘disruptive or undermine Google’s culture of belonging’ and reiterates that speakers are barred from advocacy of political candidates and ballot measures.”
This clarification follows months of complaints from workers about scheduled appearances by diametrically opposed authors Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Rajiv Malhotra. See the write-up for details on that dustup. Now potential speakers must be approved by a review team, meaning any request must be submitted at least 12 weeks ahead. So much for Googley spontaneity.
Cynthia Murrell, December 2, 2022
Management Follies: High School Science Clubism at Scale!
November 22, 2022
Several years ago, I floated the idea of a “high school science club management method.” A big time “real” journalist said, “That’s wrong. There is a bro mafia management style.”
I said, “Yeah, you are right. I paid the coffee bill and vamoosed. I wanted to bide my time until I had a few rock solid cases of the HSSCMM or high school science club management method. I am speaking from experience because I was in my high school science club. I was one of the three musketeers who liberated the morning public address announcement with Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire.”
Yep, a half century ago a band of merry teens (both young men and a couple of young women) met weekly to do science like the PA address thing. Why? I have given this great thought over the last 64 years, and here are the three main reasons we pursued our high value projects.
- We believed that we were special because we earned top grades, accrued honors (one of our club’s members published a short article in a peer-reviewed astronomy journal and yours truly had a story published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch for which I was paid $10. Net net: We thought we were really smart.
- We believed that we knew exactly what to do in any circumstance life in a Midwestern corn and factory town could plop in our path. We have confidence, which I now understand is near fatal hubris.
- We conducted ourselves as if our world was the one, true world: Math, science, logic, etc. etc.
Over the years, I have interacted with a wide range of companies. I have watched the HSSCMM move from the weird world of immature and naïve teens into the mainstream of business, leadership, and — dare I say it — techno worship.
Now back to the real journalist dismissing HSSCMM. That bright individual was incorrect. The HSSCMM is the driving force of several fascinating business dramas now unfolding in real time. These are real people (still locked in the teen year immaturity hormone rush), and having a profound impact on families, children, culture, and the way people perceive the world.
Let’s take a look at the three modern dramas, which if we were in Athens in 440 BCE, would be the stuff for the modern version of Oedipus at Colonus called “Dorks of Silicon Valley” or a bop variant of Women of Trachis named “Bros of Business.”
The first is the Twitter hellscape and the space Karen calling the shots with HSSCMM spins. A Silicon Valley infused article in the Verge provides basic information of a consequence of an informed management decision. To keep the story short, lots of people are just quitting. So the lead Tweeter is shutting down the company for a cou8ple of days. Brilliant cost savings and publicity in one fell swoop. That’s a hallmark of the HSSCMM: Act without considering consequences.
The second is the FTX thing. The estimable Bloomberg has covered the story with slightly more thoroughness than the news organization did its story about fiddled motherboards. I am not going to review this case example because I am not sure about what’s fact and what’s fiction. It does seem as though adding some chemical compounds to a mathematical experiment produced consequential results. Ah, who lost their retirement savings? Too bad. The events appear to follow a path my science club took when we poured calcium carbine and concentrated hydrochloric acid into a lab table drain. Yep, someone ignited the resulting gas. Exciting and no one got expelled.
The third is the Amazon termination of a mere 10,000 humanoids. You can get a sense of what goes into a brilliant and logical decision to cut costs in a recent CNBC report. The reality is the science club or Amazon carpetland. Those not walking on squishy floor coverings cannot be expected to understand. A basic precept of the HSSCMM is that no one in the science club really, really cares.
I am tempted to step back and offer a few thoughts about the broader implications of allowing the HSSCMM to dominate a major part of current business. I won’t. If you read some of the 12,000 posts we have published in Beyond Search since 2008, you can figure out that the fixes are going to be difficult because no one wants to confront the naïve teener mentality which has implemented businesses which leave scorched earth and burned lives.
Yapping and hand waving won’t solve the problem. I am too old to care. I won’t even remind the big time “real” journalist that it is HSSCMM, not bro stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, November 22, 2022
The Freakonomics Approach to Decision Making
November 18, 2022
It is predictable an economist like Steven Levitt would apply statistics to the process of making life’s big choices, but one may be surprised at the simplistic solution he has deduced. Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, hosts the “Freakonomics” podcast. Freethink explains how a “‘Freakonomics’ Study Offers Simple Strategy for Making Tough Decisions.” The study had each participant make a binary choice, to make a change or not, with a coin toss and report back. Levitt found a trend in the results. Writer Stephen Johnson reports:
“Most surprising were the results on well-being. At both the two and six-month marks, most people who chose change reported feeling happier, better off, and that they had made the correct decision and would make it again. ‘The data from my experiment suggests we would all be better off if we did more quitting,’ Levitt said in a press release. ‘A good rule of thumb in decision making is, whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change, rather than continuing the status quo.’ The study had some limitations. One is that its participants weren’t selected randomly. Rather, they opted in to the study after visiting FreakonomicsExperiments.com, which they likely heard about from the podcast or various social media channels associated with it. Another limitation is that participants whose decision didn’t play out well might have been less likely to report back on their status after two and six months. So, the study might be over-representing positive outcomes. Still, the study does suggest that people who are on the margin of a tough decision — that is, people who really can’t decide which option is best — are probably better off going with change.”
Perhaps. Johnson concludes with an old trick for checking your gut instinct that also involves a coin flip? Go ahead and toss that coin, then see which side you find yourself hoping it will land on. Will either of these methods really point to the best decision? Is Mr. Musk using them to inform decision making at Twitter? Are the results reproducible?
Cynthia Murrell, November 18, 2022
Math: Who Needs It to be a CEO? Answer: Maybe FTX?
November 16, 2022
Let me be clear. I don’t think much about crypto. One outfit pitched me to invest in a way for lawyers to transfer a deceased client’s digital currency to the heirs. Nope. Don’t care. Another eager young MBA wanted me to get involved in a deal offering investors shares in virtual cows. Nope. Really didn’t care.
Nevertheless, I find the ups and downs, ins and outs of the crypto world interesting. I enjoy learning how specialist firms deanonymize crypto transactions. The idea of putting a bad actor in front of a judge makes me happy. However, listening to a crime analyst suggest that more than 50 percent of digital currency transactions are related to illegal activities makes me some what sad.
I absorbed the information in “‘The Bottom Has Dropped Out’: Study Confirms Fears of Growing Learning Gaps.” Let’s assume the data in the article are close enough horseshoes, which is the modus operadi today I believe. The write up says:
In the earliest weeks of the pandemic, researchers associated with NWEA made two jaw-dropping predictions. The first — that school closures would lead to lower math and reading scores — has been borne out over and over since then. The second — that the already broad range of academic levels within classrooms would yawn wider — has now been confirmed.
The article grinds through data which make one thing clear: Quite a few students cannot do math particularly well.
I found this statement in the estimable publication The Daily Mail’s article “Harry Potter Fan Ex girlfriend 28 of Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Bragged She Only Needed Elementary School Math to Be CEO of His Start Up, Despite Being Propped Up by Funds from His Failed Sister Crypto Exchange” fascinating:
The write up states:
Ellison [the alleged friend of FTX’s founder] disliked common trading safeguards such as stop-loss orders, a way of capping losses and reducing risk.
Yep, grade school math. I think that going forward more exciting things will surface. Oh, one plus one equals two, not one plus one equals a Mississippi River flow of money. A magic wand is real too. Wave it an a million people will be really happy.
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2022
Discovering Bunsha. Wow, the Past Can Provide Some Wisdom to Whiz Kids
November 15, 2022
In early 1992 I gave several lectures in Japan. At the Kansai Institute of Technology in Osaka, I learned about bunsha. I recall that one of the people from MITI attending my lecture mentioned the concept. A representative of Kinokuniya (the then giant of Japanese bookselling and information) arranged for a slim volume to be delivered to my hotel when I arrived in Tokyo for another lecture.
I received two slim volumes: Bunsha. Improving Your Business through Company Division and Bunsha. Company Division. What Good Is a Stuffed Tiger? After leaving Japan, I added a third book: To Expand We Divide. The Practice and Principles of Bunsha Management.
These books made a significant impression on me. The authors Kuniyasu Sakai and Hiroshi Sekiyama, along with translator David Russell, explained how to avoid the management pitfalls of becoming too big. Teams can be too big. Companies can be too big. When big happens, some employees are stifled and leave the company.
The basic idea is to create smaller units and when an employee has a desire to start a company, give that employee an opportunity to do that new thing within the existing company. A brief summary does not do justice to the ideas in these three slim volumes.
The idea of bunsha had a significant impact on how I viewed certain types of management challenges. I suppose one could say, “That’s just common sense.” I am not so sure because these books codified the idea of bunsha and provided examples about the principles. Shortcomings and benefits are explained.
I read “Split Your Overwhelmed Teams: Two Teams of Five Is Not the Same as One Team of Ten.” (If the link goes dead, you have another example of knowledge erosion. A perfect example of our current management plight.) My immediate reaction was that the idea of bunsha is not familiar to the author. As I reflected on the essay, I realized that most people don’t know about bunsha and if they heard about the concept, the reaction was that it was irrelevant.
Several observations seem to be warranted:
- Information about important management ideas is not diffusing. The disheartening failures of management at technology companies essential to economic performance illustrate what happens when big fails.
- Japan itself has overlooked the importance of bunsha. The disappointing trajectory of well known Japanese high technology companies provides a number of examples. Hello, Toshiba.
- Management consultants — at least the ones I have encountered in the last 20 years — know how to gather data, cut expenses, and get their bonuses. I am not sure these individuals or some of their mentors know about bunsha.
May I suggest that a greater familiarity with bunsha will pay knowledge dividends. The books are short and are, therefore, suited to the TikTok and Instagram generation. For those older, bunsha may be too little, too late. Rediscovering ideas from a half century ago illustrates the peculiar narrowness of the Googlized information.
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2022
Twitter and Ad Revenue: Not a Surprise
November 10, 2022
Advertisers are interested in reaching prospects. Some advertisers worry about their image or in today speak, their “brand.” Therefore, what advertisers do is avoid trouble. When the dust settles, advertisers assess what channels sell and push money to them. The decision is part handwaving (early stage) and then making sales (middle and late stage) of the sales funnel.
We have some musky evidence that advertisers are in the early stage of the the new Twitter. “Twitter CEO Elon Musk Says Ad Revenue Has Dropped Massively” reports:
Elon Musk has revealed that Twitter has seen a “massive drop” in revenue since he took over the platform. He claims that activists have been putting pressure on advertisers to pause their ads on the micro blogging service. Elon didn’t state how much revenue the platform had lost, but companies that have paused ads include General Motors, Audi, General Mills, and IPG.
This is not particularly surprising. The Elon’s handling of staff issues sets a new high water mark for high school management methods. Firing people is often hired with some care and people massaging. The Elon’s approach appears to be more like a 24 year old American football lineman charging at Tom Brady. Ouch.
What’s next for the tweeter thing? The Beyond Search research team is unable to prognosticate. The Elon defies our predictive analytic methods. Remember. The Elon shot a car into space. PR or just a high school science club prank? We suggest it was a hybrid; that is, a little of both. Firing people via email is pure high schoolery in our opinion. Let loose the legal eagles!
Stephen E Arnold, November 10, 2022
An Essay about Big Data Analytics: Trouble Amping Up
October 31, 2022
I read “What Moneyball for Everything Has Done to American Culture.” Who doesn’t love a thrilling data analytics story? Let’s narrow the scope of the question: What MBA, engineer, or Certified Financial Analyst doesn’t love a thrilling data analytics story?
Give up? The answer is 99.9 percent emit adrenaline and pheromone in copious quantities. Yeah, baby. Winner!
The essay in the “we beg for dollars politely” publication asserts:
The analytics revolution, which began with the movement known as Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that were, let’s say, _catastrophically successful_. Seeking strikeouts, managers increased the number of pitchers per game and pushed up the average velocity and spin rate per pitcher. Hitters responded by increasing the launch angles of their swings, raising the odds of a home run, but making strikeouts more likely as well. These decisions were all legal, and more important, they were all _correct_ from an analytical and strategic standpoint.
Well, that’s what makes outfits similar to Google-type, Amazon-type, and TikTok-type outfits so darned successful. Data analytics and nifty algorithms pay off. Moneyball!
The essay notes:
The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore.
Is the author talking about baseball or is the essaying pinpointing what’s happened in high technology user land?
My hunch is that baseball is a metaphor for the outstanding qualities of many admired companies. Privacy? Hey, gone. Security? There is a joke worthy of vaudeville. Reliability? Ho ho ho. Customer service from a person who knows a product? You have to be kidding.
I like the last paragraph:
Cultural Moneyballism, in this light, sacrifices exuberance for the sake of formulaic symmetry. It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games. Its genius dulls the rough edges of entertainment. I think that’s worth caring about. It is definitely worth asking the question: In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?
Unlike a baseball team’s front office, we can’t fire these geniuses when the money is worthless and the ball disintegrates due to a lack of quality control.
Stephen E Arnold, October 31, 2022
Modern Management Practices: Airline and Book Models
October 28, 2022
I know zero about running an airline. Wait. That’s not true. I know these outfits struggle to leave on time and handle baggage. I have heard that the computer systems used by US carriers are similar to those in use at the Internal Revenue Service. End of my info.
I read “American Airlines is Trying to Stop a Popular iPhone App That’s Become a ‘Must Have’ For its Flight Attendants.” The story caught my attention because an iPhone app has become an object of attention at an outfit unable to do what people expect it to do. Please, reference my comment about flying on time and the suitcases.
One flight attendant said of the current situation affecting Sequence Decoder that they had “never seen a company go out of their way to make life harder for their workers.”
The operative phrase “never seen a company go out of their way to make life harder for their workers” is memorable.
I would suggest that there is another company with some management challenges. “Exclusive: Amazon’s Attrition Costs $8 Billion Annually According to Leaked Documents And It Gets Worse” reports:
Amazon churns through workers at an astonishing rate, well above industry averages.
The write up continues:
The paper, published in January of 2022, states that the prior year’s data “indicates regretted attrition [represents] a low of 69.5% to a high of 81.3% across all levels (Tier 1 through Level 10 employees) suggesting a distinct retention issue.
Two big companies. Neither seems to be able to get in sync with their employees.
Let’s step back. I have a general sense that a number of organizations are unable to manage what I would call the basics; that is, understanding what employees need to do their jobs. On one hand, a software app which appears to improve scheduling strikes me as useful. Obviously the airline’s managers are terrified of software developed by an outsider and embraced by employees. The solution is to cancel it. Isn’t that a disconnect by what I assume are GenX and Millennial managers? Could dinobaby managers help resolve the issue? Of course not! Dinobabies, my goodness, no.
I have found that the online bookstore is less and less able to deliver “next day.” But I am a sample of one. The write up makes clear that one possible reason for the slippage and some of the practices of third party resellers are facilitated is due to — you guessed it — management failures. If the company were in touch with their employees, why have churn rates that are in the ballpark for streaming services consuming billions of dollars? In my opinion, we have an example of management taking a selfie and falling into a ravine.
Observations:
- Managers have to manage and deliver success. Ignoring employee needs is a questionable approach.
- Senior managers have to provide a framework for success. Exhibiting failure at scale suggests that these professionals are not managing in an effective manner from the point of view of the employees.
- Boards of directors have to provide a framework for the policies of the company. The incidents described in airline and bookstore cases suggests that these individuals are like vacationers: Kick back and enjoy the time.
My hunch is that remediating these issues will require more than attitude adjustment, a couple of TED Talks, and new technology. In fact, fixing the issues creating these two referenced case examples may be a job for the reprehensible dinobabies and their pre historic methods. Is this a popular notion? Nope.
Stephen E Arnold, October 28, 2022
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