Over the last few weeks, many of you have said - as many CEOs have said to me over the last couple of years - "Hey: why do you talk about Google so much? Can we have some other examples?"
Now, I've talked about many other players here: Starbucks, Nike, Tata, Wal-Mart, and Ryanair, to name just a few.
But let's put those examples aside for a second. Let me offer you the same logic I give the boardroom.
The problem is this. Google is light-years ahead of, well, almost everyone. Consider how subtly yet totally Google just outflanked Microsoft. If strategy was an evolutionary tree, most businesses would be slugs, and Google would be a mammal.
Or consider what Eric Schmidt said today: that Google has a "moral imperative" to help publishers benefit from advertising. That's a living example of one of the principles we've discussed - good beats evil - being used to make real-world strategic decisions.
How many other CEOs have mentioned the words "moral imperative" recently? Almost none. The results of a search on that phrase related to CEOs, for example, are almost all Eric Schmidt - and I stopped counting after ten pages of results. More tellingly, the inverse search - CEOs who aren't Eric Schmidt talking about a moral imperative - yields almost no meaningful results.
Can you imagine Steve Ballmer, Steve Case, Chuck Prince, Michael Eisner, Rupert Murdoch, or Jeff Immelt talking about a "moral imperative"? It's about as likely as Elvis coming back from the beyond. Why don't they? Because orthodox management and strategy have given them tools and concepts built for an industrial era. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the companies they run (or ran) are falling squarely into strategy decay.
And that's how Google ends up in a league of it's own. Schmidt's quote is important because it's a vivid demonstration of Google having the courage to question business as usual - in fact, this time, Schimdt is challenging perhaps the foundational orthodoxy of industrial-era business.
Greed is good, right? Wrong. In fact, good is good: today, it's good that can be deeply strategic, and powerfully profitable.
Think about that for a second.
No - Google doesn't always get it right, it doesn't always do no evil, and doing good isn't the only new principle of management (here's another one). In the coming days, we'll discuss Google's weaknesses. But Google - to resort to an inelegant turn of phrase - gets it.
I discuss Google often because I think it just might be the first real 21st century business: a company with a radically different set of principles wired into it's DNA. Larry, Sergey, and Eric, I think, understand intuitively that the tools and concepts of orthodox strategy and management are failing today's boardroom - and, even better, they're defining a new CEO agenda for it.
Let me get your perspectives. What do you think should shape the the next-generation CEO agenda? What questions, principles, and ideas do you think tomorrow's boardrooms must discuss that today's boardrooms don't? Fire away in the comments.
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/06/redefining_the_ceo_agenda_for.html
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