Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…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?" I think if you come with data, if you run a secret experiment and you come back and you show them you usually get one of two results. Either they get extremely mad at you and they tell you to get back to work and to do what you were told and in that case, probably you need to start polishing your resume and look for another place either inside the organization or outside it because that person is not being reasonable to be honest. But the more common case is they're pleasantly surprised and that's what happened with Steve Jobs, as well. He was against phones but then people showed him all sorts of evidence that Apple can make a phone. He was against multitouch initially but then he changed his mind, there was a lot of back and forth. So even, Steve Jobs, given evidence was willing to flip and I say this in many organizations. So evidence is so powerful, that's why this is the principle I based the book on.…

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