Eric Schmidt: belief

Transcript context

…There are many published accounts of Google. As you know, they describe you as having been the adult in the room or the person who brought discipline to Google’s processes. But if you step out of your modest self for a moment — and I’m trying to write a revisionist account of Google titled “Eric Schmidt as Innovator” — you are going to describe for me in, say, two or three minutes, what you did personally that was the most innovative, how you imposed your innovative stamp on the company. What would be your story of Eric Schmidt as Innovator within Google? And not just the adult in the room. It’s important to establish that Larry and Sergei were the technological and strategic brilliant minds here. My job was to keep everything organized, and I had — and have — a bunch of rules in my mind about how you should run things. An example is, you have a room full of people. Inevitably, half the people talk, half the people don’t talk, and often the women are more likely to be dominated by the men. Again, in general terms, in terms of interruptions and so forth. What you want to do is, you want to basically call on somebody who’s not speaking — a typical scenario, you call on the woman who hasn’t had said anything. She will inevitably give an extraordinarily interesting and thoughtful answer. Then get people to respond to her, and let her speak. That kind of mechanism forces a leveling of the discussion and gets everybody on the same table. Often in companies, if you see executives that don’t manage to build the . . . Things are happening so quickly, they don’t build common knowledge, things go off the rail. Market people are doing one thing; sales people are doing another. Another thing that we did is we had a thing called 20 percent time, which was a safety valve. It would allow people to work on things that they thought were interesting. And that was your idea.…

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