Itamar Gilad: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's really important insight. People that are hearing this might feel like I like this idea of pushing back and encouraging the founders to make it more evidence guided. In the case of say Google+, was it even possible? Could you have come to Larry and Sergey and be like, "Here's all this data I've gathered that tells us this is not going to work?" Do you have any advice for how to push back and encourage the founders and execs to really take the counterpoint seriously or really kind of vet their idea? So another nice thing about Google is that it's a very open culture and people are not shy to tell even Sergey and Larry that they are wrong and they do this all the time. In certain forms, right? You need to know the right channels. But there was a very big discussion about Google+ and whether it's the right thing to create a clone of Facebook, there was a very public internal discussion. I think what I would change is not have this discussion based on opinions, because when you have the discussion you come with your own opinions usually the most senior person's opinions will win. That's just the way it is. If we had come with hard data and we said, "Listen, things are not actually panning out the way you guys are expecting. What can we do? Should we continue? Should we pivot this?" I think the discussion would've done better. Now I'm doing a huge disservice, I was not in all the discussions. I know probably in Google+, there were very serious discussions happening along these lines. But it's just as a general trend, I find that evidence is very empowering for us smaller people in the organization or mid-level managers to be empowered to challenge the opinions. Is there anything tactically you found to be useful and effective in giving people, say they don't work at Google. They work at companies where founders and bosses and execs are not as open to challenge. [inaudible 00:18:26] any tactically found about how to present a counter proposal or like, "Hey, I have this data that we should really pay attention to?"…

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