Ben Gilbert: recommendation

Transcript context

…Man, that is some dysfunctional organizational behavior as they would put it in business school. But I can totally see that being true. Yeah. One other thing that’s kind of a tech theme we can pull out of this is when we originally started doing the show, it was for David and I to understand why successful acquisitions went well, what were the characteristics. And as we started companies in the future that if not IPO hopefully sell to larger companies, how to make those more successful within the company. One theme that we immediately identified that Facebook does very well is this “keep the team separate mantra” where you let teams exist on their own for a long time. This is a big part of change management, just sort of like message what’s changing, message what’s not and allow the good things to continue for as long as possible from the smaller organization. A second big one that we’re now seeing that I think we saw first in the Acompli episode where Javier Soltero took the lead for all out of Outlook at Microsoft is when you acquire a company, promote their leader to be the leader of the organization that they’re coming into and allow all the goodness from the company that you acquired to actually grow in that much larger tree of the organization chart rather than existing just down in their little thing. Well, I think it really depends on what the acquiring organization sort of goals and needs and realities are. Facebook can take the luxury with a lot of their acquisitions of letting them flourish and operate on their own because the core Facebook business at this point, we talked about on the IPO episode, at one point it was quite challenged but at this point it’s doing so well, versus at Walmart where they’re just battening down the hatches versus Amazon. In particular, I got to think if I’m at Walmart right now and I see Amazon Go and Prime Air and drone deliveries, like I’ve got to be just terrified of what that’s going to do to my business. They don’t have that luxury.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.