Eric Schmidt...

Google CEO Schmidt ist smarter als ich dachte (ich hatte kein so gutes Bild von ihm wegen seinem Engagement bei Novell...).

Bei einer Wirtschaftskonferenz in Stanford gab es ein interessantes Q&A:

"Q: Do you think the relationship between universities and companies are in a good shape in Silicon Valley?"

"A: It's interesing when you look at the pattern: For 20 years in my other jobs i tried to reproduce [the following:]
2 grad students working with a strong faculty member in a university, creating enormous value, and every time the univerities win. (...)
The combination of a dedicated faculty member, graduate students who work 24 hours a day, no sense of limits, no sense of the impact they can have, people holding them back, a robust venture industry, good exit strategies for them, has produced tremendous economic societal, technological, human impact. (...) And we really are the envy of the rest of the world. The funny thing is, we can explain this to other governments in other societies, and they won't get it.
They think, if your company will fail, that you should go to jail. Or, if you have losses, you can't recover them. So, I have developed a tremendous respect towards the actors that have built this infrastructure over the last 50 years, and I will tell you that one of the actors is the United States government. I was, for example, when I was at XeroX PARC, on a doctoral grant. And so, let's not forget that's the universities, the government funding, the work of the graduate students, the dedication of the junior faculty, that creates it."

"What are the problems of a company of 2 guys working in a garage to a global company with 1000s of employees working in different countries, nations and cultures?"

Google has every known problem in time compression. If I'd ask you about problems of a fast-growing company you'd list things like who to promote, who to hire, who do I get a new job, where do I move to, and so on.
At Google all these things occur in parallel very very fast. So, we knew this when we saw the possibilities of monetization, which came through our advertising network, and as a result we organized the company so that it is very decentralized.
And ultimately all these organizations can only grow through decentralization. So we try to empower as much as we can individuals. So we have a number of interesting rules: For example, the engineers are told to work 20% of their time on whatever they want to, which is unheard of in companies of our scale. We spend 70% of our time priorities on core business, 20% on adjacent businesses and 10% on other. And, much of what you see in the press is about the 10% of other. And so sometimes I get approached by someone who says "Did you know that you'ss about to do this attack this and that..." and I say, "I'll go find him." This one person takes on this entire industry, which is a 10% project which means we're experimenting with.
And one of the characteristics of experiments is that it's fine for them to fail. So if you can build a culture which can in a decentralized way scale, especially globally, then you can build something that can scale very very quickly, and is also durable.

Passend dazu: Ausschnitte aus einem Rhetorikkurs von 1988. Weiß der Geier wie so was ins Netz kommt... Sicher nicht als Beispiel für Brillenmode...