Orchestrating the Ocean: Lessons Learned

Having spent two years at Google, it’s been fascinating to participate in an engine of innovation that performs at hyper-speed and at massive scale.

Typically, a business can have one quality (maybe two) working in their favor – speed, scale, or innovation, but rarely all three. And yet, day after day, roughly 182,000 freakishly smart, gifted, ambitious technology practitioners and leaders do just that.

At the end of a big week full of AI launches, industry events, forward-looking strategy meetings - a metaphor for Google’s way of working occurred to me. It’s an ocean. Picture a beautiful, blue infinite horizon with recurring waves that hit the shore, retreat, then return with almost perfect orchestration. But if you were to put on goggles and study what’s happening beneath the surface, you’d see thousands of unique, living organisms operating in chaos. Yet somehow that chaos works. It’s like an ‘agreement’ of sorts that each organism gets to explore, work in its own way, move fast or slow, make messes, and leverage surrounding resources to thrive.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Adapting to the pace, the level of outputs, and the forever-raising bar was an adjustment for sure, but in that process, I learned some incredible lessons I’ll share in hopes that it helps you adapt to your own changing workplace and feel a bit more confident that stumbles don’t mean the end; in some cases, it’s just part of the process.

1. Let stars shine – talented individuals come with unique skills and observations. Rather than asking people to conform to a standardized way of thinking, set clear goals, then trust the stars to be brilliant and get there using ‘guidelines’ versus ultra-rigid processes. The process and workflow will evolve, and new ways of working will emerge, and you must let those new shapes form. Being ultra-rigid constrains innovation and burns people out.
2. Learn to let go of control – traditional hierarchies don’t always net the best outcomes. “Leadership” isn’t about controlling who gets to talk to whom or how information is relayed; it’s about creating an environment of skip-levels, cross-team collaboration, and supporting individuals who want to explore teams and areas you don’t agree with. It’s striking a magical balance between individual ambitions and time-sensitive deliverables. Leadership means knowing how to steer outcomes, not controlling the process.
3. Ruthlessly prioritize innovation – it is extremely tempting to focus all resources on lowering costs, getting ‘one more sale,’ and promoting products. Ruthlessly prioritizing innovation means setting clear business hygiene goals, setting exceptionally high customer experience goals, and equally prioritizing innovation. Making excellent products draws more customers. Releasing excellent, innovative products draws more customers, and delivering excellent customer experiences draws more customers.
4. Go for moonshots – during a busy day, intense week, quarter, and year, the idea of a moonshot can feel like a luxury. But pulling smart people to the side and brainstorming moonshots and narrowing down to one or two feeds the innovation engine, fuels the team’s natural craving to create, and allows for some amazing breakthrough products and experiences. The process will be messy (that’s okay, it should be), but in allowing smart people to explore, they will discover things the future is asking for. A great example is AI. Google has been investing in and building it for decades. In the portfolio I’m responsible for, I look at moonshots (at a smaller scale, of course), but I’m always thinking about the business we are building towards, not just what the task list has me doing today.
5. Build on your strengths – yes, keep perfecting and evolving the core business, but consider it the foundation from which to build. What is the next huge step forward? How do you take your core technology and spawn new businesses that serve customers in new ways? Google Cloud was built on technology infrastructure already in place such as Dremel, Borg, Colossus, and Jupiter, powering search, ads, YouTube, and Gmail. These are the same technologies now used to power Google Cloud that serve enterprises around the world.

Are all these things possible every single day? No. Rather, consider how behaviors can begin to seep into how you establish team culture, ways of working, and the definition of success.

Google is an ocean of innovation and will be the first to admit that the exploration and discovery have only just begun.