Great Executives Don't Have All The Answers

Barry Diller spoke of his experience building USA Interactive (soon to be simply the Interactive Corp.). While he said that his goal was to build (in reality, buy) the leading ecommerce company in the world using multiple distinct brands, he did not imply that he was a fortune teller or a visionary. He said that he bought companies that seemed to make sense and then work hard through trial and error to maximize the end user experience. He attributed his success to a combination of serendipity and curiosity -- "you course correct off the sides of the walls as you make progress."

Steve Jobs made the same general observation. Apple's products are driven by its end users first and foremost. Jobs described the process by which Apple launched the iTunes Store (which received, to my mind, a disproportionate amount of praise). They started by learning from all the mistakes that had been made by Napster, PressPlay, MusicNet, etc. and then spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to broker a compromise between the consumers (who wanted simple, permanent, high quality, portable digital music) and the record companies (that wanted safe and economic distribution). But even with all that education (thanks to those who came before them), Jobs made clear that the store would get better as both Apple and the record companies learned how to better serve their consumers.

The most unabashed about their inability to apply vision to product design were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. As Larry said of launching products that were designed from the top of the organization, "our track record hasn't been great." That isn't to say that Larry and Sergey don't think that Google has done a good job of moving search forward -- they do. But they don't think the job is done. When asked what they would do now that Google's search was so good, Larry and Sergey had the same reaction: search isn't done. They both believed that Google's search has a long way to go yet and that it will continue to be informed by the needs of its two distinct sets of customers: the end users and the advertisers. New products similarly evolve from conception as a research project within Google's engineering group, to testing within some isolated piece of the Google world (such as Google Labs), to the ultimate launch as a Google product after a great deal of feedback and adjustment. It is this feedback loop that has helped Google build successful products to date and will likely continue to do so.

As we move towards a tech recovery (today, tomorrow, next year), those companies that have learned the lessons that USAi and Apple and Google have will fare well. And those that continue to lead by fiat will not. And, frankly, that is how it should be.