Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on leadership and success
He’s now the executive chairman of Alphabet.
Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and current executive chairman of Alphabet, recently sat down in an interview to discuss his experiences leading the company.
The full interview, which can be found on Medium, touched on Schmidt’s leadership and management practices as well as his definition of success. Here are highlights from that conversation.
On being CEO:
“My role was to manage the chaos. You need to have someone to run fast and have a good product sense,” he said. “That was Larry and Sergey. My job was to organize the world around them.”
On learning to manage better:
“As a young manager, the rule is that you absorb everything,” said Schmidt. “The next 5 years are when you’ll learn all the little things about leadership,” he added.
On advice to his younger self:
“Do things sooner and make fewer mistakes. The question is, what causes me not to make those decisions quickly. Some people are quicker than others, and it’s not clear which actually need to be answered quickly.Hindsight is always that you make the important decisions more quickly,” he explained.
On success:
“All success starts from doing one thing really well, but you’ll recruit better with a broader vision so you can sell the dream,” said Schmidt.
France Breathes a Sigh of Relief at Front National Defeat
A wave of tactical voting keeps the Far Right out of power – for now.
France’s (and Europe’s) political establishment is breathing sighs of relief after French mainstream voters rallied together to defeat the far-right Front National of Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s regional election run-offs.
The FN failed to win a single one of the six regions where it had topped the ballot in the first round of voting a week earlier, as a wave of tactical voting by Socialist and center-right Gaullist voters ensured that their two parties would continue to dominate local governments.
The results suggest that the wave of populism in European politics that followed the Great Recession and the Eurozone debt crisis may be receding, if only in the short term. Protest parties from the U.K. to Greece have all seen their support peak or fall in elections this year. Opinion polls suggest that elections at the end of this week in Spain will confirm the trend and return Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to power.
The French stock market was the best-performing in Europe Monday, as a wave of relief supported stocks. The benchmark CAC-40 index was up over 1%, while other European markets made smaller gains.
But Sunday’s results couldn’t overshadow the fact that the FN polled more than 6.82 million votes nationwide, a new record high for the party, beating the 6.42 million polled by Le Pen in the Presidential elections of 2012. It also tripled its number of local lawmakers nationwide.
“Election after election, the national flow (of support) rises inexorably,” Le Pen said via her Twitter account Sunday evening, blaming “a campaign of slander from the System and those who live by it” for the results. French commentators said Le Pen will likely use the narrative of being a victim of an elitist cabal to garner support in future campaigns.
“The refusal to make any compromises with extremes allowed these results,” Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the center-right bloc, told his supporters Sunday. But he stressed that “this mobilization…must not under any circumstances let us forget the warnings sent in the first round to all those in positions of political responsibility, ourselves included.”
“When the issue is serious, French voters cast a more serious vote,” said Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank in Berlin, noting that voter turnout had risen to nearly 59% in the second round from 50% a week earlier, as the prospect of the FN winning power galvanized opposition to it.
The number of extra non-FN voters who took to the polling stations ensured that the FN wasn’t able to raise its share of the vote above the 27.9% it gained in the first round. It ended in third place behind Sarkozy’s Gaullists (41%) and the Socialists of President Francois Hollande (30%).
Schmieding added that the risk of Le Pen becoming President in 2017 has now receded.
However, her momentum is far from having been stopped completely. The underlying causes of FN support–chronically high unemployment, tensions with France’s immigrant Muslim community and resentment at Germany’s increasing domination of the Eurozone–are still likely to be present the next time the Eurozone’s second-biggest economy goes to the polls in 2017.
Vandals Attack Facebook Building in Germany
Hate speech on the social network against migrants has surged.
Vandals have damaged a building housing Facebook Inc.’s FB -3.24% offices in Hamburg, smashing glass, throwing paint and spraying “Facebook dislike” on a wall, police in the northern German city said on Sunday.
The overnight attack on the social networking group was carried out by a group of 15-20 people wearing black clothes and hoods, police said in a statement. An investigation had been launched.
A Facebook spokesman said nobody was injured in the incident. He said he could not immediately comment on the possible motive for the act of vandalism.
The European head of Facebook is under investigation in Germany over the social network’s alleged failure to remove racist hate speech.
The investigation was announced last month as German politicians and celebrities voiced concern about the rise of anti-foreigner comments in German on Facebook and other social media as the country struggles to cope with a refugee influx.
Martin Ott, Facebook’s managing director for northern, central and eastern Europe based in Hamburg, may be held responsible for the social platform’s failure to remove hate speech, a spokeswoman for the prosecution said last month.
A Facebook spokesperson last month declined to comment on the investigation, adding “we can say that the allegations lack merit and there has been no violation of German law by Facebook or its employees.”
Facebook has a partnership with a group called FSM, which monitors multimedia service providers on a voluntary basis, and has said it would encourage its users to push back against racism.
Critics of the social network say its lax policing of rules against hate speech has allowed xenophobic reactions to the sharp rise in migrant inflows this year to flourish. Attacks on hostels for migrants and asylum-seekers are commonplace, with two arson attacks taking place over the weekend in Lower Saxony and Thuringia. There were no casualties.
The U.S. Economy Is Still Missing 6.4 Million Jobs
If you thought the U.S. had recovered all the jobs lost during the recession, think again.
In June 2014, the American economy reached a momentous milestone—it recovered all 8 million or so jobs it had lost in the Great Recession.
But a new study out Monday from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce says that that celebration was premature. The economy is still missing 6.4 million jobs.
Those missing jobs represent the difference between the number of jobs now—148.9 million—and what employment would have been had the recession not interrupted job creation—155.3 million. If the economy manages to add at least 205,000 jobs per month, that divide will close in 2020.
It may seem counterintuitive that the economy is missing that many jobs since—with unemployment at 5% in November—the United States is nearing full employment. But the joblessness rate doesn’t account for those workers who are discouraged to the point that they’ve stopped looking for work or those who are underemployed and holding part-time, temporary, or freelance gigs. The underemployment rate stands at 9.8%—down from a high of 17.1% during the recession but still well above pre-recession levels.
The Georgetown Center says that the 6.4 million missing jobs have contributed to a slack in the labor force that’s best illustrated by the employment-to-population ratio, which measures employment among all working-age Americans, not just those actively looking for a job. Before the recession hit, that rate stood at 62.8%. It sank to as low as 57.8% during the recession and is now at 59.3%.
That relatively low employment-population rate is one reason Americans haven’t seen a meaningful increase in wages, says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center and the report’s lead author.
Carnevale said it’s coincidence that this report was published two days before the Federal Reserve is expected to announce an interest rate hike. Nevertheless, he says “there’s a preponderance of data that shows it’s too early to take the foot off the gas.”
The High Cost of Free Speech on Campus
The best solution to troubling speech is more speech, not less.
My college friend Kent George had vastly different political views from mine. We didn’t see eye-to-eye on any topical issue then and probably still don’t today. But he lived down the hall from me freshman year, and we ended up watching reruns of the Groucho Marx TV show, “You Bet Your Life,” every night at 10. And when my family moved to his hometown, we played a lot of bluegrass together (he took the upright bass, I played the spoons).
Those memories are precious, but I wouldn’t have them, and neither would Kent, if we had decided to hang out only with students who thought the same way we did.
Kent came to mind this week when I read about the resignation of Yale lecturer Erika Christakis, an early childhood educator at the Yale Child Study Center. Christakis was troubled by a request from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee that students avoid wearing “culturally unaware and insensitive” costumes at holiday parties. Christakis sent an email to students:
I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?…. If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.
What could be wrong with a call for tolerance at one of the nation’s oldest and most respected universities? According to a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Christakis may not have fully appreciated the extent to which many students at Yale continue to experience oppression at the school. This includes “chronic, structural racial injustice — such as the persistent paucity of black faculty members and administrators at Yale, the common experience of being the only black student in some classes, and being disproportionately likely to be stopped and asked for ID — or worse — by campus police officers.”
Of course, Yale is not the only campus where minority students have recently confronted injustice. At the University of Oklahoma, a fraternity sang about the virtues of lynching. Another fraternity at Arizona State mocked the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. by flashing gang signs and drinking alcohol out of a hollowed-out watermelon. A Duke student threw a noose around a tree at a campus plaza. And students at several schools have attended affairs in “blackface” or as Mexican stereotypes.
How can such activities be considered funny or clever?
As Altaf Rahamatulla, a Ford Foundation program associate, recently noted in Fortune, students are protesting these hateful activities with great passion and in huge numbers, as they did this fall at the University of Missouri. What’s disturbing in a different way, however, is how some of that passion is expressed.
One student at Yale, who was upset by how Erika Christakis’ husband Nicholas has been running her residence hall, cursed and yelled repeatedly at him, as a widely viewed YouTube video reveals. Erika was so upset by the reaction to her email that she no longer felt comfortable enough to remain on faculty and she resigned. (She declined to offer comment for this article.)
However much some Yale students objected to Erika Christakis’ email, and however much her remarks betrayed an insensitivity to racial tensions at the school, the proper response can’t be harassing her to the point that she decides that teaching isn’t worth it.
To its credit, Yale’s administration wants Erika to reconsider her decision. “Her teaching is highly valued,” administration officials said, “and she is welcome to resume teaching anytime at Yale, where freedom of expression and academic inquiry are the paramount principle and practice.”
I’m not convinced, however, that the leaders of other academic institutions, both public and private, are similarly committed to free speech. Consider, for example, how often you learn that a controversial commencement speaker was disinvited to speak after students (and, in some cases, faculty) objected. Former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers are just three examples of this trend.
Such leaders “are invited because they have played a major role in shaping American history,” says Mary C. Kelly, a history professor at Franklin Pearce University. “Whether we agree with them or not is secondary to the objective, which is to send students into the world with the understanding that they’re not going to find every idea that comes at them palatable or comfortable.”
Education at its best doesn’t tell you what to think; it shows you how to think. “The purpose of higher education is to equip students with the tools to challenge beliefs and language that they don’t agree with,” says Brown University political scientist Wendy Schiller. “You can’t succeed at that if you don’t present that language.”
“Can you imagine even wanting to go to a university where all you were told is what you wanted to hear?” my college friend Kent asked me when I brought up this issue with him. With that question, Kent and I finally found something to agree on other than the value of watching classic quiz shows and playing country music.
Sometimes the best leaderships lessons in education come from elementary school. At Harmony Hills in San Antonio, Texas, Mrs. Hairgrove, my music teacher, had us sing a song called “Freedom Isn’t Free” by Paul Colwell. The chorus went, “You have to pay a price, you have to sacrifice, for your liberty.” The idea still holds true. The best solution to troubling speech is more speech, not less.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered