The skills and competencies that contribute to the entrepreneurs’ success

Pay attention to your crazy ideas and cultivate the best of them

“Talk about the future” is the word that told by Lawrence Page at University of Michigan’s engineering graduates in 2005 and that time Google had 3,500 employees, one-eighth as many as it does now.

Audacious ideas were one of the concept that he urges his teams to believe in. In 2009, he said at the Google Faculty Summit, “by tackling big ideas that could really change the world, you attract incredibly smart people and achieve something worthwhile, even if it’s not your original goal”. The Google group researching artificial intelligence instead of came up with the advertisement targeting system, which accounts for almost half of revenues.

The Google’s search engine idea was came to him in a dream about downloading the entire web and keeping the links, he told Michigan graduates. He said “When no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition”.

“He is very engaged in what challenges people face and his engineering brain often kicks in”, says Grady Burnett. Grady Burnett is the one that led Google’s AdWords office for five years in Ann Arbor and currently work for Facebook.

Build your team, avoid bureaucracy

For years, in every hire at Google, he insisted to being involved. At his early hires, most of the graduates was from Stanford University or University of Michigan. Co-founder Sergey Brin and him was met while in graduate school. When some of them want left and establish their own companies, most of them have stuck around because of his approach. Some people had recently promoted to lead Google’s major product divisions which among the first 10, so employees the company hired, dating back to 1998.

Steven Levy said “It’s remarkable”, he is the author of the recently published book in Plex, a look inside Google. “Those people are rich enough to buy anything and they’re still working, committing to a few more years” with the company. Levy said “It’s a belief in Larry”, he is a senior writer for Wired.

Lawrence Page was quietly reassigning or cutting middle management and bureaucracy while he and his recruiters continue to look of thousands bright young graduates to join Google. The company was recent reorganization and reinforces that notion.

Levy who had interviewed him around six times said that “he has a problem with traditional management. He doesn’t like it”.

Be quick. Be concise

He is working to cultivate a nimbler and faster management in Google which had employed about 26,000 people around the world. According to the Wall Street Journal, he has asked his staff to give him about 60 words updates on their current projects that the holding.

Besides that, he also looking to encourage faster openness and decisions. Top executives are asked to sit around together for one day per week which is the time for quick choices and collaboration. 

According to the San Jose Mercury News, he looking to encourage the immediacy-minded attitude that prevails at YouTube.

Recognize the significance of small moves

Google’s staff always improve their products by adding new features and improving the usability of Gmail, Android and their search engine, they always improvise and improve every time. He told that he gets “a new build” on his Android phone every day to an audience in Europe. “It continues to work better and better every day.”

Google also focused on connecting with the students, staffs and user base. Most of satellite offices was located at the college towns across the country. In metro Detroit, they have offers classes at colleges and high schools in order to teach them how to use AdWords for charities and non-profits.

Bud Gibson said “We’re training the 21st Century workforce, and making a significant impact on local Michigan nonprofits”. He is a professor of computer information systems at Eastern Michigan University.

Even if the students never been in the Googleplex headquarters, they also can use the skills to join a Web 2.0 company and try more use of Google products.

Small steps might bring some improvement and big rewards to the Google’s reputation. They more focus on making the Google’s products become more user-friendly to the users.

Persevere

For Google’s book digitization project, its take about six years for him to get staff and work on it. When he and Brin was students at Stanford, he came up with this idea. The first books were scanned at year 2004.

Besides that, it also took few years to launch Google Maps with Street View. In 2009, he told the Google Faculty Summit that “I had the camera in my car and took a bunch of video”. He keeps convincing himself it would work and kept working on convincing others after convincing himself.

Around 1993, he joined the Michigan Solar Car Team and showed that he interested in alternative fuel cars. Currently Google is working on robotic car that can drives itself and adding information on where to recharge electric cars on its maps. The people that come out with this idea was expect him to continue launch it no matter the amount of payoff.

The book project has been targeted by authors and publishers which state the project gives Google big advantage over competitors and infringes on their copyrights, this might test his perseverance. About end of March, Google’s proposed settlement was rejected by the federal judge and saying that it would might give Google significant rights to exploit the entire books without the permission of the copyright owners.

Lessons he can stand to learn

He has to offer all the leadership lessons and certainly has some lesson he still must be master. He has to communicate more with others, either to Google’s partners, the media and others. Levy said “If you’re the CEO, you’ve got to be communicating more to the outside world.”

He might paid a huge amount of money for this particular quality. One day, after his earnings announcement the Google stock declined more than 8%. This happen because he didn’t hold Q&A (Question and Answer) session with investors at a post-earnings conference call.

In order to dealing with adversity, especially related to government anti-trust regulators, he may need some lesson. Besides from the book project suit and others, he might not really able to grappled with too many obstacles until now.

After that, Google reported a 17% increase in quarterly with net income up to $2.3 billion from the previous year but missed the forecasts from Wall Street’s. The company also said that they were going up to hire 6,200 new staffs and become the largest hiring spree in its 13 years history.

His approach and optimism to leadership are worthy of imitation by everyone.