Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Larry Page declaring war on both corporate and human aging

52% of the year 2000 Fortune 500 companies no longer exist today -- why?  Just like humans have a life cycles, companies do too -- large companies cannot sustain success without continued innovation.  At the same time, it is extremely difficult for any large companies to keep innovating out of their comfort zones of existing business.


I had an opportunity to lead some of the most exciting cloud products in Cisco's history, yet I know first-hand how challenging (and rewarding!) it is to innovate within a large company.  There is always resource, business model, skillset, toolset, rewarding system, and most importantly mindset conflict between keeping established business happy vs. branching into new product areas.

Historically, "spin-xyz's" are some of the interesting answers for big companies to combat "Innovator's Dilemma".    For instance, Fairchild did a successful "spin-off" and created Intel, Cisco did a nice "spin-in" of Nuova and created a multi-billion dollar compute business from scratch, now Google apparently is trying out a new model, which I am calling it as "spin-up", with the Alphabet vs. Google announcement.

Time Magazine covered Google two years ago when Google started tackling the human aging problem with calico.  What was super amazing 24 hours ago was that Larry Page officially declared war over corporate aging too!!

1 comment:

Neehar said...

Interesting insights and I agree with with your observations about Cisco :)