Incompetent Middle Management Killed Google

&gt; The author made this story available to Medium members only.<p>What are the incentives for doing this?

The blog post this discusses is freely available: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627373" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ln.hixie.ch&#x2F;?start=1700627373</a>.<p>I don’t see it agreeing fully with the title of this post. It says:<p><i>“Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management.”</i><p>So, it claims “inept middle management” is a symptom, not a cause.

I feel a much stronger urge to blame the c-suite.<p>Ultimately it is so much simpler. Google is a growth stock. It&#x27;s value isn&#x27;t in revenue. It isn&#x27;t even in the YoY growth. The value is in the second derivative of revenue. It&#x27;s value is predicated on the company staying on the &quot;fun and super linear growth&quot; part of the sigmoid growth curve.<p>The growth is changing inflection and they have to do everything they can to keep the illusion that it isn&#x27;t alive because once Google stops accelerating the stock will crash and it will &quot;fail&quot;.<p>So the c-suite could manage the transition from a growth stock to a dividend stock, or they could keep chopping off bits to keep the old dream alive for one more quarter.

It&#x27;s just the money. The stakes are simply too high. You are dealing collectively with millions of dollars in total compensation between just a few people in a room having a meeting. Every single gesture or slight or brilliant idea or suggestion made can have a direct consequential impact measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. It becomes completely impossible to be truly open and honest and collaborative when that&#x27;s the case. Everything becomes a life and death struggle of competition. People with $800,000 mortgages and $70,000 car payments to make are thinking about very little else. It&#x27;s pure game theory at this point, where any productive work is a side effect.

It makes sense to manage the search and ad business quarter to quarter, but if that&#x27;s all they do then they will soon get disrupted by the next big thing like AI. They also need to keep thousands of internal startups running in &quot;change the world&quot; mode so they can disrupt themselves and stay in the game long term. I thought thats what they were doing with letting everyone do their Friday projects.

Don&#x27;t forget Sundar

&lt;loads google.com&gt;<p>&lt;checks search engine market share&gt;<p>&lt;looks at Alphabet&#x27;s latest P&amp;L&gt;<p>Uh... they&#x27;re sure showing a lot of life for having been killed...

Use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;12ft.io&#x2F;</a> to read if you aren’t a member

Should be changed to &quot;Incompetent Middle Management Kills All Companies&quot;.

And Medium killed the blog only to replace it with more paywalls.

“The author made this story available to Medium members only.“<p>Bye