a team like that into their personal office for weeks on end.”
Gore may have been a prod, but the execution of innovation at Google is due to the focused passion Brin and Page bring to Google. Barry Diller, who had that unsettling session with Page and Brin in the early days of Google, when Page would not look up from his PDA to talk to him, now thinks what might be construed as rudeness was really focus. “They had their own method of communicating and processing,” Diller said. “They give much less quarter than other people do to common business courtesies. They’ve stayed true to this. It’s a spectacular strength. It means you never get defocused by the crowd.” At Google the focus is on the engineer is king culture Brin and Page had the precocity to impose.
True to its open-sourced, wisdom-of-the-crowd ideals, Google has created a networked management. It is bottom-up as well as top-down management, and it unleashes ideas and effort. “There is a pattern in companies,” Page explained, “even in technological companies, that the people who do the work—the engineers, the programmers, the foot soldiers, if you will—typically get rolled over by the management. Typically, the management isn’t very technical. I think that’s a very bad thing. If you’re a programmer or an engineer or computer scientist and you have someone tell you what to do who is really not very good at what you do, they tell you the wrong things. And you sort of end up building the wrong things; you end up kind of demoralized. You want to have a culture where the people who are doing the work, the scientists and the engineers, are empowered. And that they are managed by people who deeply understand what they are doing. That’s not typically the case.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Is “Old” Media Drowning?
(2008)
On a sunny July afternoon in Sun Valley, three friends who had competed and cooperated for a quarter century—Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney; Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS; and Peter Chernin, the COO of News Corporation—gathered for sodas. They sat beside a tranquil pond, but their world was not serene. By the summer of 2008, the economy had started its swoon. The shrinking of the audience for their broadcast networks and TV stations had accelerated. Their stock prices were getting mauled. “At least we’ve had a good run,” Chernin said, half joking.
“Yeah,” Iger replied with a laugh, “but I feel like we’ve gotten to the orgy and all the women have left!”
“We sound like three old men sitting in Miami Beach with blankets over our legs!” Moonves cracked.
The network and station business was once much easier. “The era when I worked at ABC was fantastic,” recalled Michael Eisner, who was a program executive at the network before leaving to become CEO of Disney in the early eighties. “There were three networks, and all I had to worry about was ‘Did we have a good show?’ Even if we had a bad show, we did OK.”
What does it feel like to be a media executive navigating these swiftly churning waters? Before he became CEO of Sony, Sir Howard Stringer spent much of his life in traditional media, starting as a researcher for CBS News and becoming an award-winning news producer, president of CBS News, and president of CBS Broadcasting. Today, seated in the Sony dining room in New York, he said, “If you read every piece in every newspaper and magazine about new technology, you would walk into the East River! There are so many options out there, simultaneously, that it’s a dizzying experience. For every time you see an opportunity, you also see a threat. Every time you see a threat, you see an opportunity. Or if you see a threat, you’re afraid you’re missing an opportunity. That’s the one-two punch of the technological marathon we’re all in. You worry about missing a trend. You worry about not spotting a trend. You worry about a trend passing you by. You worry about a trend taking you into a cul-de-sac. It means that any CEO or senior executives of a company have to induce themselves to have a calm they don’t feel, in order to be rational in the face of this onslaught.”
Sony, like others, had reason to fret about missed trends. Before Stringer was CEO, the company that in 1979 had introduced the Sony Walkman was being challenged in 2001 by a stylish upstart, Apple’s iPod. By 2003 Apple’s iTunes offered singles that could